Sunday 31st August 1997 1.16am

It’s very hard not to think about Dad all the time that I’m not feeling mites (or whatever they are) on my face and ankles.

[…]

[My sister] spoke to Dad today. I didn’t. She said he was very solemn, and they’ve told him the heart attack was ‘bad’. Lucy [a friend of mine from Northern Ireland, living here in Birmingham] advised flying and hiring a car, when I went round to Deb’s this evening.


Sunday 31st August 1997 (again) 1.00pm

Princess Diana is dead. Along with Dodi Al-Fayed and a Ritz chauffeur, she was in a car crash in Paris and died at 3am British time (4am Paris time) from heart attacks in hospital, after two hours of medical attention.

I got up at 11.03 to come down and watch Hollyoaks. I noticed that the Archbishop of Canterbury was on BBC1 and BBC2, and though the Queen Mum had died. Then there was a shot of a wrecked car in Paris and the news that it was Diana.

As if to add to the misery, it’s raining heavily here, although not in London, where flowers are piling up at Buckingham and Kensington Palaces. Pleasingly, the BBC reporter there has said that lots of gay men are turning up because of her support for AIDS charities.

I rang [my sister] – she and [her partner] didn’t know, and we wondered if it was a bomb, but it was a pursuit with the paparazzi on motorbikes, crashing in the tunnel. Dodi was pronounced dead at the scene.

Poor Charles had to tell William and Harry. There’s uncertainty over whether she’ll have a state funeral. I don’t think the nation will forgive the Windsors if they don’t allow one.

Tony Blair’s comments moved me, and Earl Spencer, her brother, said he “always believed the press would kill her,” but didn’t expect that they would “take such a direct hand in her death”. Strong words indeed.

There’s solemn music in Radio 1, all BBC programmes suspended for continuous news. How considerate that they’ve just mentioned that Eastenders will be shown next Sunday. I was wondering.

In the midst of all this, I also rang Mum and left an answerphone message. [My sister] says she’s with [a friend] from Cambridge, out walking somewhere. I rang Dad at the hospital but they were busy and he had to ring me back. Our conversation ran out when his money did, but he didn’t complain that I told him [my sister] and I were going out there, with one of us accompanying him back. I wish it were easier to talk to him, but the payphone doesn’t have a number.

There’s a heavy atmosphere of gloom. It’s even dark now. I was going to go into work, or to Ikea, but I don’t think I’ll bother now. This is a uniquely depressing day.

I can’t help thinking that Diana lived her life like a film script, and it has ended in tragedy, and romance like a story by her step-grandmother, Barbara Cartland. No one would have been happy with an ending written like this.

Even Tom Cruise is on now, talking about the press harassment. She was the most photographed woman in the world. I would guess only Michael Jackson is more famous. No other person has so much attention paid to them. It’s an unnecessary tragedy.


Sunday 31st August 1997 (yet again) 11.56pm

Three diary entries in one day – and what a sombre, miserable, grey day it has been. All day I’ve been thinking we’ll wake up tomorrow and the Diana story won’t be true. At the same time, I’m worried about Dad. I only got to speak to him for about a minute, long enough to say we were going over, earlier today. I’m petrified of flying there, regardless of any other fears.

It has been a “horrible” day, as David Dimbleby said at the end of another tear-inducing tribute tonight. Radio 1 is still playing the same rotation of quite nice easy listening tunes. The only one I know is Sylvian & Sakamoto’s ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence’. It seems to crop up every hour. Oh, and Enigma too. People were saying on TV tonight that because the press (albeit the mercenary paparazzi) killed Diana, we shouldn’t buy tomorrow’s papers. It’ll be hard not to. Of course, no one knows if the chauffeur had a heart attack, skidded on oil, etc., but the photographers chasing them have been condemned already by the self-righteous TV journalists, as Bob Geldof pointed out.

Labels: Diana, diary