Ten years goes by so fast
There are certain events which enter popular mythology, almost help to define the structure of a lifetime or at least of one's memories. The older you are, the more of them you accumulate.
My first memories of "the news" date from well before I started school. I recall liking the name "Goldwater" and thinking "Kennedy" was a boring name, so I hoped the former would win. I assume those would have been the Democrat primaries? I was nowhere near five at the time. I remember the white smoke when the Pope was elected, and I mean John XXIII, not Paul VI. I was nearly three then. I'm not a Catholic, so I don't really know why that made such an impact, but it did - I wanted to know how they controlled the colour of the smoke. Still do, actually. I recall being told by my infant school teacher that I should always remember "this day" because John Glenn had gone round the world in a space ship. I was not yet six then.
However, the first "big" news event for me was surely the assassination of Kennedy - on a Friday evening, not long before our favourite comedy programme of the week was due to start - Here's Harry, starring Harry Worth. My little brother adored the opening sequence and whine solidly for an hour because it was postponed and all there was on TV was boring music and a newsreader's grim face repeating the same news. My parents were far too stunned to tell my brother off. The next night was much more interesting - a brand new TV show started, called Doctor Who.
My brother was probably more interested than I was in teh next big news event, man on the moon. It happened at a very inconvenient time, somewhere in the middle of the night, and he stayed up all night to watch it. I didn't. That was also the month Prince Charles was formally invested as Prince of Wales and I watched that far more avidly, mainly because Dad was there in Caernarvon with the contingent of police sent by our county, and I hoped to see him. I didn't.
I missed a lot of the seventies because I was having a life - as a student, in the days when that meant no TV unless you went specially to big shared TV rooms. One only did that for important things - so the only things I can recall on TV from that era are Princess Anne's wedding (we went to mock mainly) and a whole load of Python, Who and Trek episodes, also watched as much for the cameraderie as for themselves. There may have been wars, economic crises, nuclear alerts - it all passed me by.
As an adult I watched the news far more, of course, and recall a lot of key moments. A few stand out - Thatcher with her obnoxious abuse of St Francis of Assissi as she entered Number Ten. The mob frenzy when they arrested the Yorkshire Ripper and a furious crowd besieged Dewsbury Magistrates' Court. But I couldn't tell you much about the circumstances in which I watched or first heard of these events.
It was the death of John Lennon which fit into that category. I was in hospital for a minor op, in a single room, and, thus isolated, had no idea why so much Beatles music was playing all day out in the main ward. It wasn't till the paper boy came round with the local evening paper that I discovered the news. It was as if a part of my childhood had finally been killed off.
I do remember the end of Thatcher - a sixth form girl came running into my classroom (I was teaching a much younger class at the time) to announce the news which had been on the radio sixth formers were allowed in their common room. She was delighted, but such was the type of school that there were actually tears amongst some of teh younger ones as the news got round over the next couple of lessons.
Fast forward, then, to more recent "defining events". 9/11, of course - mid-afternoon, supervising a test. A colleague came in, whispered that something very wrong had happened in New York. When I got out I made it to a room with a TV feed - not many do, but this one was set up to receive foreign language TV, so I saw it first in French, not long after the second tower fell. The sense of shock was acute, the huge wave of compassion, anger, fellow-feeling for the US. (Why did you throw that away GWB?)
But the point of all this, of course, is that other, weird "defining moment", ten years ago tonight, and the week after it.
I'll be honest. I was never particularly enamoured of Diana. She did charity stuff, yes, but that came with the job, and she'd dumped most of her charities, some in mid fund-raising campaign, a few months earlier. She was clearly having fun with her new boyfriend, but her much-vaunted love of her children didn't seem to be getting in the way of long, long holidays in the Med on his luxury yacht. She's always struck me as a girl obsessed with the rank she could achieve and unwilling to accept the restrictions and responsibilities that it brought with it - and she was no ingénue unaware of the world she was joining - her family is quite as aristocratic as the royals, frankly. She was good at sentiment and self-publicity, less good at duty. She did some very worthwhile things, but I could never warm to her.
That's why it hit me so hard, I think. At 4.45 that Sunday morning my friend in Atlanta rang me (yes, I had cyber-friends even in those days). She'd seen the news on CNN, last thing before planning to go to bed.
"Diana's dead."
"Diana who?"
Yup, that's how much impact it made. Next thought :"Oh those poor boys." That was about it.
I rang off, switched on the radio to confirm, went back to sleep. When I woke up the world seemed to have gone insane. For the whole of that day there was nothing - absolutely nothing on TV or radio except Diana. News from the hospital in Paris (Yes, she's still dead), talking heads outside Kensington Palace, news camera from Balmoral (some people thought it was heartless to take the boys to church on the morning they were told their mother had died. That's how secular our society has become - very few could imagine it as anything other than rigid protocol - who could possibly seek consolation from the church for such a loss?)
That week was bizarre. Not only was there a sea of rotting flowers outside Kensington Palace and Buckingham Palace, there was one in almost every town centre across the country. Pictures of Diana - divorced but still in a tiara - appeared in house windows and shop windows. It was media-fuelled, undoubtedly, but what was really frightening was the fact that a lot of it wasn't. A national paroxysm of grief, from which I felt totally excluded. It was as if my country wasn't my own any more, unless I was prepared to give myself over to synthetic grief. I had emails from people I knew through forums, from all over the world, telling me that they sympathise with "my" loss. My loss? I never met the woman. Why was I suddenly expected to be distraught?
That was the week Mother Teresa and Georg Sholti died too, almost unnoticed in the frenzy. The tabloids mounted hysterical attacks "in keeping with the national mood" on the Queen and other royals for not demonstrating enough public distress. There were mutterings of republicanism. All for a woman who would have remained totally obscure had it not been for mer marriage into the royal family they were now ranting about. (I'm not saying the royals are perfect, far from it. But the only reason Diana was ever at all well-known was because of the publicity opportunities her marriage gave her.)
It culminated in The Funeral. I think the timing helped - a beautiful warm day at the end of the summer, so people could swarm into Hyde Park, take their sandwiches, make a day of it. But there was no mistaking the grief on those faces for anything other than a real experience, for those people, at that time. The spontaneous hurling of bouquets to form a carpet of flowers, the applause (Applause? At a funeral?) after her brother's eulogy, the weeping as the cortège passed - all these were real, though totally and utterly alien to me .
I think that was the start of my disillusion with Blair - his "People's Princess" speech seemed so very orchestrated, so calculated to demonstrate how he shared our grief. I'd been as thrilled as most people that May, when the Tories were finally given the drubbing I'd been longing for, but after Diana, I never felt trust, really.
The media has been in a Diana-led feeding frenzy most of the month already. Today several tabloids have manufactured excuses to put her picture on the front page. After a decade she still sells cheap newspapers. Whether or not Camilla and Charles attended the memorial service was also apparently major news. Retrospectives fill the pages even of the serious papers, and the airwaves on the BBC. (Though scroll down to the comments in that second link and the majority are expressing views similar to my own, I note.)
It's easy to dismiss Diana as a rich, spoilt, massively overprivileged young woman who was very good at emoting. She was hungry for publicity and died at least in part because of just the attention she courted. However, she seems to have had the courage to espouse unpopular issues - she genuinely did do something worthwhile for AIDS victims, if only by making it clear you could cuddle an AIDS baby and live, and she did do good work in opposing landmines and cluster bombs - though neither have disappeared from use or manufacture. Her very lack of dedication to the cause of the monarchy brought it into question and perhaps triggered a few reforms - I am a monarchist, but that doesn't mean I'm against change.
In the end, though, this anniversary takes me back to a week in which I felt a stranger in my own country, nauseated possibly more because the hysteria was real than I would have been if it had been less so. I hope we don't go through anything quite like that for a very long while.