Thinking of Diana since Crown 6

[Sowhatsnext123]

Anyone else? I absolutely LOVE the crown. Mainly because of the powerful, haunting music. But since watching it this evening I feel really sad and nostalgic. I was only 13 when my mum woke me up crying. I remember it was thundering where I was the day after Diana died and it just felt so eerie. I didn't really like her when I was a kid because my Dad and Nan thought she was too rebellious and so I assumed the same but I was gutted when she died and so were they, as if they were sorry. I remember thinking well she was 37 she was quite old anyway! I'm now 2 years older than she was. She was far from perfect but she was such fun, such a lovely young woman. Thinking about her a lot tonight and her poor boys. I do wonder where she would be today had she lived. I don't think for a second she'd have been with Dodi for very long.

I'm watching the crown season 5 now. It's good so far.
Obviously I'm wondering if certain things are true, like Peter Townshend giving princess Margaret back her letters so they didn't fall in to the wrong hands after his death. Nice idea.

That was absolutely horrendous. Just awful.

I remember my parents breaking the news very clearly. I had a bit of a cry at The Crown episode, mostly I think feeling for her boys who are the same age as my children now

I think it is in bad taste to portray Diana as a ghost. Totally unnecessary!

Here's another thing that really, really pissed me off when I watched the funeral back years later. The flowers. I understand people gracefully throwing lillies or dropping rose petals onto the hearse as it was passing under bridges. But people were literally lobbing full bouquets at the window blocking the drivers view and he obviously couldn't windscreen wipe them away. By the end of the procession the poor man couldn't even see in front of him. Just before they hit the motorway they had to stop the car to put them by the side of the road. It was absolutely ridiculous and he must have been really stressed out trying to navigate through it.

@TrishIsMySpiritAnimal while I agree with most of your points, I do think that there were three in the marriage from the outset. It was a Fleet Street open secret; Private Eye serialised Born to be Queen (in the style of Barbara Cartland, for obvious reasons) at the time leading up to the royal wedding, in which Charles was continuing his affair with Venetia Barkworth-Smythe.

Hilary Mantel does it brilliantly and cruelly in her novel Beyond Black where a suburban psychic is haunted by ghosts she doesn’t want at all, some horrible.

Diana makes a couple of ‘spirit appearances’, wearing her tattered wedding dress, talking about her sons (the cruel bit is that she can’t remember their names and calls them ‘Kingy and Thingy’) and telling ghost paps to ‘bog off’.

Diana was known for her tolerance of others, not exactly an american trait (I'm not surprised though as one trait they have is making it everything about them). Her shaking hands with homosexuals with Aids, that would have turned the stomach of the nation whom Bowie referred to as puritanical in regard to sexuality as to why his announcing his bisexuality was a mistake there, the same nation who shunned Queen and Freddie Mercury (now replete with his "gay" moustache) unlike everywhere else where they were accepted.

To kill a Mockingbird...a white saviour book (which they fittingly regard as sacrosanct) written by a white woman about racial bigotry (in the most racially bigoted nation in human history, the one who invented banning interracial marriage (anti-miscegenation), a law which only ended in 1967, and the one "founded" by a group of slave owning racist tyrants), and the hero of this book is? A white man (the narcissistic 'white saviour' trope.."me me me"...while the blacks (the bleedin basis for the story) are relegated to minor characters firmly in the background.

Given her compassion and tolerance of others there cant be a much bigger slur that being labelled "american at heart". She was the antithesis.

I was 40 plus weeks pregnant with DD2. So was up early in the morning to the news.
It was shocking. But I think it's fair to say the entire country went bonkers for 2 weeks.
My dsis came to visit the baby and was told, when buying champagne that this was no time to celebrate anything. I had her on the Thursday and the funeral was on the Saturday. More than a few people suggest that she should be called Diana!

@DC1888, I don’t disagree about To Kill A Mocking Bird, but the rest of your post is insanely sweeping generalisations. It’s a huge, diverse country, with a range of opinions and political positions. Apart from anything else, nearly 40% of Americans aren’t white.

how can you miss her? you didn't know her and the crow is completely fictitious. how on earth could they possibly know private conversations between people that have since died?? just a good drama to me

I can absolutely assure you. Crows exist

@Sowhatsnext123 lol you got me there bloody iphone

Before the queen returned to London they sent out minor royals to talk to crowds outside the palace, Andrew and Edward maybe? Testing the crowd reaction for the queen later on perhaps. I remember being surprised to see William and Harry shaking hands with people and having to brave face it through strangers crying and calling out to them, however well intentioned they thought they were.
Fair enough if they’d asked to see the flowers and take a minute together as they had outside Balmoral. It just looked horrendous for them to have to go through that in my opinion.

It was horrendous indeed. Those poor boys being faced with that absolute bullshit. Shameful.

The whole country went collectively bonkers. It was a surreal time. I really could not understand this performative outpouring of grief for a woman the vast majority had never met. A friend was visiting me at the time and we just watched sci-fi videos back to back for several days because the TV coverage was so maudlin and unrelenting.

Very sad for the family and especially for her young sons. But I was absolutely unaffected by it all. Most of my friends felt the same.

I upset a manager at work a few months after her death - someone made a reference to it and I said 'Wow, Diana died? they kept that quiet, didn't they?' and he told me off before flouncing back into his office.

It was batshit. And a year later articles in the papers saying 'OMG what happened, why did we all go nuts?' er, not all of us did, thanks.

The Mail/Express are still languishing in full-on "if only Diana was still here..." mode.

I suppose they know their audience, but they carry on as if her mere presence would have prevented global turmoil, cost of living crisis, refugee/immigration mayhem, and likely cured all cancers as an aside.

It's utterly bizarre how a relatively inconsequential figure is still venerated and worshipped as a quasi-deity. Cult of personality indeed.

Same story with QEII. Clearly not an inconsequential figure given her longevity, but every single account of her actual persona paints her as a rather boring woman who was, truth be told, a bit dim. I suppose doing that job for as long as she did merits respect of a sort, but the folk carrying on like it was a national catastrophe that an extremely elderly woman died need to have a word with themselves. The idea that she was a huge loss because nobody else will be able to replace her dignity is nonsensical. If there's nobody capable of doing the job, get rid of the job. Competence is hardly the sole preserve of people who own magic hats.

I think if anything the aftermath of a death in that family serves to highlight how absolutely ridiculous and discordant the entire monarchy is in this day and age, so hopefully a few more of them will do us a favour and snuff it in short order, and expedite they day where we are finally rid of them for good.

I agree OP. I miss her. As much as you can miss someone you didn't really know. The actress playing her in the Crown is doing a good job. However there are huge chunks of missing events. The portrayal of the Royal family is ridiculous. Dominic West as Prince Charles. He's more credible in his bank ad.

The Mail/Express are still languishing in full-on "if only Diana was still here..." mode

Richard Kay still picking at her bones to get a living, I see. It's a wonder there's anything left for him to write about; him and Burrell.

I think early death has meant Diana is remembered with fondness and her good qualities. And not the extremely emotionally unstable woman that she really was. William and Harry were raised by nannies, not Diana or Charles - it's only because William has married into an incredibly close and "normal" family that he's as stable as he now is. You only need to look at Harry to realise that the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and look at the damage he's now doing to the RF.

Diana got in a car without a seatbelt, with a drunk driver at the wheel. How many other parents do you know that would have taken that risk?

To be fair to Diana she may not have known he was drunk (if he was)

I was 27 when she died and heavily pg with my second dd. We were on the way to a parenting thing at the NEC and I'd popped to the local garage to get snacks and heard the radio saying princess had died. I didn't clock who it was until I got home and my dh told me. We binged the whole half section of the Crown last night. Was a lot of scenes obviously never know for certain would happen but I didn't know (if this is true) that she just wanted to get back to London for her boys and seemed to realise she had been living a wild kind of life. The paparazzi was incredibly cruel but look how much a prized photograph of her could fetch! At the end of the day I still feel so sad for the boys and what they've all missed out on x

I meant I was 24! Not that means anything but also maths not my strong point 😬