Princess thoughts.

It's twenty years since Lady Diana Spencer, for a while Princess of Wales, died. I remember my son calling the news up the stairs early that Sunday morning (at least my memory says it was a Sunday) and wondering if she had committed suicide. This shows how little I was following the royal family stuff. I had no idea she was busy with love affairs and thought she was still going through depression.

But no, not a suicide, it was a stupid accident that could have been avoided. I have long thought that all they really needed to do was pay no attention (different from ignoring) the attendant paparazzi. Of course they were a nuisance but if the famous couple had driven away calmly, just sitting in the car, giving the journalists no scandalous photo opportunities, the cameras would have tired of clicking and they would have reached their destination and been able to shut the doors on the world. Instead, they joined in the game, scuttling away in an over-excited fashion, driven by a chauffeur inexperienced in security work and possibly the worse for drink. An avoidable and unnecessary end. 

That's my take on it anyway. I didn't join in the public outpouring of grief at the time and right now I am heartily sick of the fuss that is being made all over the media. I feel for the two young men who were left motherless when they were still very young boys. And I am sure that their talking about it now has probably helped them a good deal. But I don't want to know intimate details of what Diana said about Charles and their relationship. And that is that.

I switched on the radio this morning to find that Radio 4's Women's Hour appeared to be dedicated to Diana: busily gathering people's opinions of and reactions to the "momentous event". Lots of sad memories and tales of taking flowers to the gates of the palace but one caller said how horrific she found the week of the death, not because of grief but because it was impossible to express any opinion that did not praise Diana and show great sorrow. I remember that! Apparently quite a lot of people let them know that they were switching off as they found it all rather boring and annoying. As for me, I found myself listening somewhat fascinated by the ideas discussed:

Diana as a feminist.
Diana as a role model to women in bad marriages.
Diana the fantastically wonderful mother.
Diana as a fashion icon. I particularly liked the black American who said that Diana is greatly admired by black American women because, like them, she did style flamboyantly and with attitude - she had the walk and everything!
Diana the great compassionate humanist - one of the programme pundits pointed out that the queen as a young woman had visited lepers in hospital but that her compassion did not receive the same publicity as Diana's to AIDS victims!
Diana the great beauty.
And on and on and on!

Of course, one of the main things is that she appeared on the scene at the start of the great obsession with celebrities. We were just starting to get 24 hour rolling news and huge media coverage of the lives of the rich and famous. And the ongoing soap opera of the simple ordinary girl who became a princess and then found that it was not all a Disney fairytale but more like the Brothers Grimm was fascinating stuff for many people.

And the myth of the sad princess was created and lives on. HIlary Mantel writes about her in this article:

"From her first emergence in public, sun shining through her skirt, Diana was exploited, for money, for thrills, for laughs. She was not a saint, or a rebel who needs our posthumous assistance – she was a young woman of scant personal resources who believed she was basking with dolphins when she was foundering among sharks. But as a phenomenon, she was bigger than all of us: self-renewing as the seasons, always desired and never possessed. She was the White Goddess evoked by Robert Graves, the slender being with the hook nose and startling blue eyes; the being he describes as a shape-shifter, a virgin but also a vixen, a hag, mermaid, weasel. She was Thomas Wyatt’s white deer, fleeing into the forest darkness. She was the creature “painted and damned and young and fair”, whom the poet Stevie Smith described."

Had Diana not died so dramatically and had the public not responded with the mass hysteria of grief, would the royal family have changed to become more media friendly? Would Charles have been able eventually to marry Camilla and have an apparently happy relationship? Would William have gone off to university to meet a seemingly ordinary girl and make her into a modern princess? Would Diana have been invited to that wedding? Or would she still be a thorn in the side of British royalty? Who knows? That would be a different reality.

On the day of the Royal Wedding (note the capitals!) we attended a friend's "stuff the wedding" party. The television was put away in the attic for the day so that nobody could give in to the temptation to switch it on. We did not watch Diana's funeral on TV. Indeed, I drove through empty streets that day, one of the few disrespectful people out and about on such a day. We also failed to watch that other royal wedding when Kate Middleton turned into a princess, but I suspect rather more knowingly than Diana Spencer.

For a person who finds it hard to understand why we still seem to need princesses in the 21st century, I seem to have gone on quite a lot about them today. That's all!