Princess Diana's death

[smutchin]

I was never much interested in Diana or the royals generally but her death was definitely one of those "you always remember where you were when you heard the news" moments.

In my case, I was in bed with a young lady friend...

 

[Dirk]

If I'm honest I didn't care then and don't now.

My sentiments exactly.

 

[I like Skol]

In my case, I was in bed with a young lady friend...

Listening to the radio news? You kinky barsteward.......

 

[smutchin]

Listening to the radio news? You kinky barsteward.......

Our son was born nine months later, you know.

 

[TheDoctor]

You feckin' deviant! Be ashamed, be very ashamed...

 

[swee'pea99]

she, like all traffic 'accident' victims

It did occur to me even at the time how little attention was paid to the fact that if she and her 'people' companions hadn't taken it as their god-given right to drive through a major city at 100 mph, she wouldn't have died.

 

[TheDoctor]

I felt the same....on a personal level I felt sad that a fellow humanbeing had died but I didn't buy into all this celeb stuff. I think now is a time for John Donne:

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

Yes, you make a good point. Anyone dying early is a waste of potential, of what they could have done and achieved.
I get that and completely agree.
It's the cult of mourning, the hysterical wailing of a whole country that slightly alarms me.

 

[Redlight]

I'd organised a bicycle treasure hunt around the City of London for that day and the first I knew of the whole business was when someone phoned me to ask if it was going ahead. Of course it did, there was a good turnout and at the end we all repaired to a bar in Spitalfields Market, which was doing typically brisk Sunday afternoon trade.

I found all the national wailing afterwards rather nauseating but I feel a lot of it was encouraged by the media. It was they that started pressurising businesses to close on the day of the funeral. I was handling media relations for a bank at the time and we started getting calls from the tabloids asking if we were going to close "because all the other banks are". Of course, all the other banks were getting similar calls, as were the big retailers. In the end we did close, against the better judgement of the management, because we didn't want the s--t that the same media would dump on us if we didn't.

On the day of the funeral I had to drive down to Cornwall. It was fabulous - virtually empty roads all the way. One of my friends got harangued by his neigh ours for mowing the lawn!

 

[slowmotion]

The article "Those Who Felt Differently" by Ian Jack in Granta 60 is well worth a read. At the time, I was just amazed at how the media could manipulate peoples' emotions so powerfully. It was quite scary.

 

[Crackle]

I remember where I was and what I was doing, same as when it was announced that London had won the Olympics and other such stuff. I felt sorry for the boys, was gobsmacked at how people reacted, don't care much for the current coverage, in fact I switched off the news today and haven't read the papers at all. I feel the same level of empathy for them as anyone else in that situation, except my view is that with their privilege and in their position thay have a duty to do something positive with their experience, which, to their credit, they seem to be. Beyond that............

 

[captain nemo1701]

I woke up, switched on the telly that was still set on Ceefax (anyone remember that??). Odd thing was that about a year or so later, I'm certain the BBC did a 'one year on' documentary in which they interviewed a lady who was very pro royal (I am bored with them, an anachronism from the past when we were ruled by kings & queens) and she had a scrapbook full of press cuttings about Diana etc. She went on to say that she blamed the paparazzi for her death...er...book full of press cuttings?. You went out and bought the tabloids my dear, so therefore maintained the market for the paparazzi.

 

[swee'pea99]

how the media could manipulate peoples' emotions so powerfully. It was quite scary.

It's worse than scary. I had a gimlet-eyed bitch of a woman harangue me when my girls were young for taking photos of a paddling pool they were happily splashing about in. She clearly felt it was no less than Her Public Duty to all but openly accuse me of being A Filthy Pervert. This was at the height of the paedophilia hysteria a decade or so back...the time when paediatricians found themselves hounded by smug self righteous imbeciles.

 

[theclaud]

This anniversary was obviously being discussed this morning on the radio, and people were phoning in their memories. One particular woman was excitedly giving a long-winded and detailed account of her pilgrimage to lay flowers, meeting people on the bus, etc etc. She had to be interrupted in the end. I think a lot of people wanted to feel part of something, or rather not left out, and perhaps it gave them a spurious sense of celebrity somehow.

Thanks to a week of half-days at work, I caught most of the Woman's Hour item. Was that the woman on the tube who was overcome by a spontaneous floral-tribute urge that she claimed was out of character? Joan Smith (who wrote perceptively about the Diana myth in Misogynies, long before Diana's death), was on, alongside a dreadful woman called Ingrid who edits some upmarket version of Hello magazine called (in a satisfyingly ironic echo of Smith's work) Majesty, and a pleasant but not especially interesting geezer called Ken who was a bodyguard or something. Jan Garvey (I think) was incredibly defensive about the toxic cocktail of sentimentality and hostility that characterized the popular and media construction of the princess, and kept interrupting Smith and attributing things to her she had not said - Woman's Hour takes a deeply apologetic attitude to feminist analysis, as if it's obliged but sorry to trouble its listeners with such upsetting ideas, and likes to 'balance' it with deeply conservative perspectives. It did at least manage to counterpoint this with contributions from some younger women, neither of whom was asked very good questions by Garvey, but the more interesting of whom writes for Gal-Dem and has written about what Diana meant to a black girl raised on the disneyfied princess culture of the 90s and 00s.

 

[theclaud]

It's worse than scary. I had a gimlet-eyed bitch of a woman harangue me when my girls were young for taking photos of a paddling pool they were happily splashing about in. She clearly felt it was no less than Her Public Duty to all but openly accuse me of being A Filthy Pervert. This was at the height of the paedophilia hysteria a decade or so back...the time when paediatricians found themselves hounded by smug self righteous imbeciles.

I can understand your annoyance, but it's perfectly possibly to express it without referring to a woman as a 'bitch'. As the father of girls/women, perhaps think about how the word might make them feel when they are on the receiving end of it.

 

[swee'pea99]

I can understand your annoyance, but it's perfectly possibly to express it without referring to a woman as a 'bitch'. As the father of girls/women, perhaps think about how the word might make them feel when they are on the receiving end of it.

If the cap fits...It's not a gender thing. I doubt many men like being referred to as a see you next tuesday, but I don't see that as a reason not to call them it if it's merited.