To still not understand the Diana "thing"?

[TeaCake5]

As William and harry said they were bewildered by people who didn't even know her acting in the way they did. Yes it was sad that she was killed but to hand around kensington palace for days crying? Ridiculous.

I think Diana's death started off the entitlement that is a blight on this country even now, people were braying for the royals to come to London even though they were with 2 children who had just lost their mother,

pantryboy fairly shit attempt at parody there. 3 out of 10. Must do better.

She hadn't seen her boys for a month because she was too busy jetting round the world having fun and flouting the press.

I was at school at the time and it was full of groups of girls going around crying and wailing. I'm sure they just did it for attention... I just thought, Oh how sad, and then didn't really care.

I feel sorry for William and Harry now, having to put up with media attention about it.

Isn't it them who have stirred up this attention? They are playing with fire. They have spent years asking for the paparazzi to leave them alone but now they are courting attention. They will regret it.

I remember a woman on the local news, shaking her head sadly and saying "I feel like I've lost a daughter".
And I was at the shallowness of it all.

Hilary Mantel published quite an interesting article in the Guardian last week about Diana and the whole 'thing' around her.

I totally get it. I was overseas with my DH when it happened. No TV. I cried and cried. I wasn't influenced by seeing other people crying as I didn't see TV for a couple of days. DH didn't understand my grief.

There will never be another Diana.

I remember my mum being upset by her death. My mum had nursed people with AIDS and found Diana genuinely changed public attitudes.
There was also quite a feeling at the time that it wasn't an accident

If the media hadn't made such a thing of it, I wouldn't have thought any more than 'that's a shame'. People must have very empty lives for the death of someone they don't know to impact them AT ALL.

YANBU OP. I never got it either. It was very sad, of course it was, but I do think there was an element of 'performance grief' about the whole thing. I always find it slightly odd, and frankly, a bit cringey, when people act devastated about the deaths of people they never knew personally.

I found the public reaction really disturbing at the time.
On hearing the news in my kitchen I was firstly: very shocked, because of her age and fame; then very quickly thought how awful because of her young sons. However I didn't feel as I would if it was a friend or family member had died, and pottered around listening to Radio 4.

I lived in a northern village at the time so like many people, my Sunday newspaper contained lots of copy that predated knowledge of her death. You know, the stuff the media had been pumping out all that summer about her embarrassing her sons with her new eurotrash lifestyle; obsessive predatory behaviour with lovers irrespective of their marital status; and her propensity to woo new bestest friends then drop them when they said or did something she didn't like.

For months after her death, Private Eye doggedly ran a then-and-now item quoting papers and columnists describing Princess Diana falling off her perch into a Princess Margaret like descent etc. etc. - then days later casting her as the saintly virgin bride and mother, wronged by the Royal Family.

I also found it strange that beyond a statement of sympathy and sorrow, and offers of support for the Spencer family in managing logistics around her funeral, the Great British Public expected an acrimoniously divorced person's in-laws to jump to centre stage after her death. Surely that would have been grotesque and have infuriated the Spencer family. I wouldn't have want my first husband's family calling the shots after our divorce. The royal family were in a hopeless predicament.

I think the press helped whip up the hysteria to deflect attention from the role of the press on the mechanics of her death, and their attempt to set up the Royal Family as the guy was spectacularly successful.

I'm astonished to this day at the hysterical grief of strangers in the following weeks and I don't view it sympathetically at all.

There will never be another Diana There will never be another anyone.

@TabbyMumz she was striking close up but she wore a ton of makeup.

My dad had recently died. I remember going into work on the Monday and one of my colleagues was sobbing, I was concerned and went to comfort her and she was bubbling on about Diana.

I don't know how I didn't shout at her, I just walked away. I thought, you've got no idea what grief is.

When Diana died, a crack appeared in a vial of grief, and released a salt ocean That is it in a nutshell. Hilary Mantel strikes me as very bitter though. Didn't she do a hatchet job on Kate in the name of feminism of course.
www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/19/kate-duchess-cambridge-hilary-mantel

I wasn't a Diana fan or particularly interested in her at the time. It was still shocking that someone so young with young children, died in an awful accident. I remember feeling at the time that she was a ticking timebomb who had no idea what she was doing.

I didn't join in the 'national' grief and avoided any coverage of the funeral etc. I thought at the time that it was horrendous to put so much pressure on a grieving family but it was strange time - coming on top of the Blair election victory and a feeling of a new populism, I can understand why there was a feeling of 'ownership' of the royals by some.

I would think Will and Harry are hoping that they give the public a brief bit about their mother and then they don't have to go there again.

I found it all bizarre. I'm the same age as Prince William and so felt very sad for him as couldn't imagine his sadness. The whole public outpouring of grief was just strange though and I find people's fascination with it still strange. I don't see the need - other than the media wanting to sell their collectors edition plates and magazines.

She wasn't perfect, she was very good at playing the game. I remember my mum being heartbroken and crying - and I couldn't work out what on earth for! She was a good mum but no different to a lot of other mums I knew. Albeit with a lot more privilege than most. My mum was a good mum, she died six months after Diana did. I remember wondering why it was such a big deal for Diana yet my mum wasn't talked about by others weeks later. I was 15 in my defence.

My brother died two years before Diana and in a car crash also. Because of the age of my brother (14) and for unknown reasons the press decided to run with the 'story' it was horrific, every time we left our house there was reporters, they even filmed my mum and dad leaving a car park after going to the coroners office. There was nothing we could do apart from not leave the house.

I cannot imagine how it felt for William and Harry to be on display or fair game to the media. They were at the end of the day teenagers who had just lost their mother. I personally think the Queen was right not to come back to London after the death, yes she may be the Queen but she is also a mother and grandmother and she decided at that point being a mother and grandmother was more important, I can't understand why anyone would think the need of the nation was important.

I'm lucky - for want of a better word - that the media soon got bored of our 'storey' quite quickly, I couldn't imagine having the press keep replaying that day over and over for years.

Competitive Grieving. I hate it. Every time someone famous dies there's this huge competition to be first to share the news on facebook with "OMG RIP" etc . Same as when there is a tragedy. It's like people want to prove they are better than everyone else because they empathise with victims so much more than those who don't share this stuff. I remember people who I had called me strange at school for being a Bowie fan in the 90's posting "Oh God I loved him" when he died. Wasn't what I remembered, love. I thought you thought his fans were "weirdos" and he was "Gay".

YABU if you judge people who loved her, and thought she was a wonderful human being, who were upset when she died, and are still upset now when they think about it.

People pissing all over peoples feelings, and mocking how they feel, or how upset they are when something happens they they deem as trivial, really grates on me to be honest.

Only an utterly heartless bastard would trivialise two young boys losing their mother, in any sort of way. It's terrible and unnatural - no parent should have to bury a child, but no child should have to bury a parent either. Especially in the way that funeral went.

However, as for 'pissing over people's feelings' on the matter, people who didn't know her really have no right to latch on to the family's grief. Feel sympathy/empathy of course, but behave as if they personally knew her and still 'grieve' based on watching tv or shaking her hand once, deserves scorn. You only knew what you saw, not the real person. She wasn't a great beauty, or a saint in earth. She wasn't innocent, a victim of circumstance, nor was she utterly deserving of the bad things she went through. She was just a person, playing a role - unique in her time but you can't move for her 'types' in these multimedia days.

Anyone who didn't truly know her, were over invested at the time and to this day give her anything more than just a passing thought are nothing but grief vultures.

No, derxa have you read the piece on Kate/Catherine (I realise I have no idea what her name is is she Catherine Cambridge? Catherine Wales?)? It was popularly reported as a hatchet job by tabloid hacks who didn't get it, but it was actually rather sympathetic to KM, and more about the public image required of of female royal bodies etc. It came out in the LRB, so not sure if it's publicly available any more, other than behind the LRB paywall, but it's worth a read if you can find it.

I just found it all so distasteful. I was the same age as William at the time, and have always been very close to my mum. I couldn't fathom how I would feel, grieving for my mum and having to be displayed like a bloody zoo animal at the same time, seeing this outpouring of pretended grief for someone so close to me who no-one else knew.

I wouldn't watch the funeral out of respect. It felt wrong - like going to some random church, sneaking in the back of a strangers funeral and watching with popcorn.

And just the amount of media coverage that there was, and still is - given how she died, was (and is) horrible.

I was watching a channel 5 documentary about this and Ian Hislop said a man told him his wife had died of cancer the year before and he hadn't cried for her, but he did for Princess Diana. I did wonder whether the weeping and wailing was in part because people weren't grieving in any real sense, just caught up in some hysteria, whereas if someone you actually know dies, real grief is exhausting, confusing and draining, so it was a kind of outlet for people who could 'grieve' for a couple of days and then get on with their lives. No excuse for bullying the Queen into attending to their hysteria instead of concentrating on the two children who were experiencing actual grief that still endures to this day.

Also Eddie Izzard talked about this mass grief on one of his live comedy shows. He said "I was 7 when my mum died. Nobody gave a shit". He had a point.

She was a privileged woman who let a privileged life and it was sad, as it is when anyone dies way before their time, but it just made me feel a bit sick and slightly appalled.