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.

The beautiful/not beautiful thing is interesting as well.

Most people with money to spend on themselves will look better than someone similar looking but with no spare cash. Someone healthy with expensive teeth, hair, clothes and diet will scrub up well but it doesn't make them beautiful IMO.

I'm dead sure i wouldn't look twice at Catherine if she passed me in the street - but we keep hearing about how beautiful she is It's just a thing the media try to convince us of i think.

She wasn't very naturally beautiful, she was thin and expensively made up. Sarah Ferguson/Dutchess of York was always much prettier, but she was also fatter, and didn't look as good in designer clothes. She was never seen as a 'beauty' by the press, whereas Diana was. It was really height and thinness.

MIssEliza I agree and said so on another thread some time back. Charles is vilified by so many people because he cheated on Diana (to my mind, this just makes them more like the rest of us, when half of all marriages end up down the pan and cheating is a lot more prevalent than we probably used to think) and yet look at his sons. Most people seem to think they are both very well adjusted, sensible, caring young men - a lot of that must be down to Charles and "the firm" because for all Spencer's posturing, he's done very little with them. The boys also genuinely seem to really like Camilla too and they all seem really happy in each other's company. The constant stoking of Diana's death every anniversary is unfair on them. Move along, nothing to see here.

I admit I got caught up in waiting to sign the book and I watched the funeral - but it was as much to experience a part of history as anything...

But - I can sort of understand the mass-hysteria; it was a complete shock and people did feel like they 'knew' her - it was that quality which drove her media stardom!

Rosa Monckton, an actual IRL friend of hers, is quoted in the Times today saying this:

“I just remember kneeling in front of her coffin in the Chapel Royal and thinking, ‘Well, now, finally you are at rest.’ Her life was such a turmoil, and her death was awful and sad and dreadful, but I felt, ‘She is at peace.’

As an outsider, it did feel like that to me at the time.

I think the criticism of the royal family was as much to do with their perceived slights of her during her lifetime as how they handled the end.

What I can't bear is the millions and millions of pounds spent trying to examine whether her accident was some sort of 'hit' by the security services- so ridiculous. And the people who simply won't believe it wasn't. Mohammed Al Fayed has said all manner of things with no proof and whilst of course he is grieving, and I appreciate may find it very difficult to accept that his staff/security people may have contributed to the outcome on the night through bad decision making, this shouldn't have been allowed to drag on the way it did. There was an element there of trying to protect his own reputation and it irks me that people don't see this.

InvisblekittenAttack I think that's a matter of personal opinion. I thought Diana, especially in her youth, was exquisitely beautiful. She was very elegant and had a classy demeanour. I get the feeling all heads turned when she passed because she was so attractive. Sarah Ferguson, however, I thought a bit of a plain gurner, regardless of her weight. I could imagine her in wellies, caked in mud with a sweaty brow and milking a cow. Can't say the same for Diana.
I'm not the royal family's greatest fan. I have to be honest and say that I thought she was literally the best thing to come out of it. Charles...pft, the less said about him the better...

Shatner I think William and Harry are as nice and well-adjusted as they are because they had Diana in their formative years. Weren't they 15 and 12 when she died? She had an incredible input, I'd imagine, raising them to become the men they've become. The Royals that precede them are a bunch of robotic dinosaurs.
Also, we have no idea how idea how often William and Harry see Diana's side, do we?

The thing is diana was not just unfaithful too, she was unfaithful a lot, albeit she was not first in the marriage to break her vows, there was actually quite a few men, and some of them married, the will carling thing as an example was really distasteful and I felt awful for his wife who was thrown into a media hurricane when it was revealed Diana was sleeping with her husband.

There was a lot of bad publicity, the men, the holidays, the on a yacht in a swim suit with yet another different guy, not with the kids, running around Paris, kids at home, with Dodi. Then the pregnancy and engagement rumours. It was so in our faces. Every day another story.

The game of cat and mouse with the paps, seat belt free in Paris, whilst her kids were back in London was really the culmination of that and what led to the tragedy.

That's what makes all the weeping and wailing at the time confusing for many of us. Would she have settled down quietly had she lived? I don't think so, I do think she had an element of attention seeking to her and I think that would have continued even if she had lived to a ripe old age.

I'm not saying that she wasn't a good mother - but it's fair to point out that those boys were in boarding school from the age of 8. I think that it's not right to suggest that she was parenting them in any fundamentally different way than Charles would have or would have been normal for her class.

www.theguardian.com/news/2002/feb/11/guardianobituaries.princessmargaret
Princess Margaret was the Diana of her day but the difference was that she was an insufferable snob. The Queen couldn't understand why there wasn't the same outpouring of grief over her sister's death.

Why hadn't she seen William and Harry for a month?

Another here who didn't and doesn't understand all this public grief/hysteria for people they don't even know. Our wedding day was the day of Diana's funeral and it was a nightmare, people even asked us if we were going to cancel it because of the funeral? Err WTF, no way, it's someone we don't know! Had to have flowers delivered the day before, no hairdresser etc, etc and the church said we couldn't even have the bells rung "as it would upset people in the locality of the church". We got married at 4pm that day, so way after the funeral anyway!!!

Bluntness I agree with you but in reality we don't even really 100% know if he was the first. His affair was the first to emerge, true.

I was older than Diana when it happened and I was baffled at the reaction. As a Scot and a republican, I often feel removed from much of the royal hoo-ha - I had a fleeting moment of compassion for her sons who were a similar age to my own, and that was that.

I did watch some of the footage during that time. I wasn't prepared for the crowd's wailing and tears, and I found it repulsive. The nasty piles of cellophane (flowers barely visible) left me speechless - such a total waste of money and, frankly, what just looked like a huge mess on the streets of London.

Here were two bereaved children obliged to conform to the stiff upper lip rule of the royal household while their "subjects" cried and shouted over someone they'd never met. It was a disgusting show of feigned emotion, and I felt embarrassed for the wailers.

I don't get it either. It was sad, but no sadder than anyone else dying young and leaving a young family behind. Why should it be sadder just because she was famous? I find it very weird how people become so attached to public figures they've never met, whose public, 'airbrushed' persona is all they ever knew. Raking over the details of her personal life, family relationships and the circumstances of her death is just prurient, mawkish and frankly distasteful.

We'd got the early edition of the Sunday papers, when it was reported as "Dodi killed, Di injured". We discussed the headline on the way home from the shops, and we generally felt that her latest bloke being killed would be something more for her to play the victim about, to milk public sympathy from.

Got home and switched on the TV to find out more, and as soon as we saw the presenters in black ties we knew what had happened. Watched with mounting disbelief as the hysteria ramped up throughout the day - it was fascinating in a horrible way. Couldn't believe how people were speaking about the royal family, and making demands of the queen. The queen, FFS!

But that was all part of Diana's legacy - she cheapened the monarchy and turned it into a celebrity sideshow, aided and abetted by the press. Her "accessibility" made people think they knew the royals, made them seem more human, just like us etc., and once that mystique went, so did the respect.

I was a royal watcher rather than a supporter, and had followed the pursuit of a bride for Charles closely for the 15 or so years of speculation. Whoever he married would have had the same attention, but in my view Diana Spencer hadn't the class or the intelligence to cope with the job. I didn't mind her at first, but Princess Anne reportedly called her an upstart, and other artistos thought she was "common", as her unsuitability became increasingly apparent.

She certainly killed off my interest in the royal family, and yes, her death was a dreadful thing for her children, but there's no denying that the event must have triggered a sigh of relief in some circles. She'd very likely have only have got more bitter and embarrassing, and more unhinged.

Vive la république, etc...

There is about, what, 65 million people in the U.K.? If it was as much as 5 percent of those doing the weeping I will eat my hat. So the reality is probably 95 percent of the population wasn't. Due to the small percentage who were , and vocally so, and egged on by the media, history is recording this as a nation swept by grief and I don't think it's accurate. It was simply a nation saddened by a tragic and needless loss of life.

Two wee boys lost their mum,it's tragic. I think people could relate to her so maybe that was the main reason for such open public grief. I find it tiresome and disrespectful to hers sons the way the media go on about it though. Im the same age as prince Harry so was quite young when it happened so didn't really know much about the royal family before that point.

I always though that sarah Feguson got a rougher ride from the royals than diana did, and still think that her marriage was ended to see how well the public would take to a royal divorce.

no one would have suspected her of being a beauty
Pathetic

I honestly don't think that is 'pathetic', I think it's an acknowledgement that her myth contributed to her glamour, and that, with a husband with no sexual interest in her and who has never been faithful, Diana became conscious of the compensatory value of her looks to the way in which she was 'loved' by the public, and cultivated them as her best weapon. I don't think it would take a massive stretch of the imagination to imagine her as a much more ordinary-looking landed gentry wife in brogues and sensible handbags and haircuts (like her perfectly nice-looking but not goddess-like sisters), rather than beautifully dressed and groomed and photographed by Mario Testino -- and she does look absolutely astonishing in those photos...

MoGhileMear

I really don't see "IT", of the three pictures only one stands out to me. But then beauty is subjective.

I wonder whether those people who were grabbing at, and hugging the two young princes, will admit to it now they've said how distressing that was for them.

But that's my point, Boney -- Diana could also look perfectly ordinary, and it's no big stretch to imagine her not being recognised as a beauty, had her life panned out differently.

I'm dead sure i wouldn't look twice at Catherine if she passed me in the street - but we keep hearing about how beautiful she is

I think she and her sister look hard as nails, myself. But expensive, well-manicured nails, of course!