So Where Were You Guys When You Heard The News 20 Years Ago?

Yes. So what? I'm not seeing the embarrassing part. Who cares who she married or what country they were from? Who cares what the King's half brother is like?


Says who? Her Majesty isn't in the habit of letting me know what she does and doesn't want or what she does and doesn't find embarrassing, and I doubt she tells you either.

But I'd imagine recordings of her son telling his girlfriend he wants to be her tampon would probably rank rather higher on the embarrassment scale than her ex daughter in law marring an Egyptian, yet she never killed Charles.

Okay, I remember it. Not sure how it helps. America was once a British colony too, do you think the Queen would go around murdering ex family members if they married Americans?

And how would the Queen even go about having somebody killed? Does anybody really believe that she can just ring MI-6 up whenever she feels like it and tell them to send a couple of 00 agents to murder people she finds embarrassing? Do you honestly believe that that's how the British government actually works?

Not to mention, how would this murder plot play out? The plan was... somehow get her driver drunk and then hope that this a) makes him drive really fast and b) then have a high speed crash? And of course you also need the blind luck that Diana would forget to do her seatbelt up into the bargain.

I sure hope our (hypothetical) 00 section can do better than this!

No they aren't. For example Princess Anne was taken to court for speeding in 2001. She pleaded guilty and was fined £400. The following year she was convicted under the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991 and was fined £500.

The Queen specifically is technically above the law - but do you really think that would stand if she was proven to have committed a murder? Do you know what the historical precedent is for a monarch that breaks faith with the British people and acts as though they were above and beyond repercussions?

Here's a hint : it involves a civil war and an axe.

How would you know this?

You assume incorrectly. I am British.

Where is your proof she was? Please don't blather on about a ring, that was Muhammad going off the rails after the deaths. 

20 years ago I wasn't old enough to know or care who Princess Diana was, much less remember where I was or what I was doing.

One thing I remember about the whole thing was a week or so later when they had the funeral. I was looking to move at the time, and I'd rang around a few likely places to find a room to rent. I arranged to go see one around noon on the day of the funeral, whenever that was.

I drove into London on the A2, which is a pretty decently big road - and it was almost completely empty. I didn't drive into the centre or anything, only about half way in from the M25, but I saw like three other cars the entire way in.

I gets to the house in plenty of time for the appointment and nobody is in. So I wait for the landlord for a good half hour. Finally I rang him up and asked him when he would be along.

He was completely incredulous. He literally said to me "Don't you know what day it is?!" in the most outraged tone you can imagine, as if the very idea that I'd expect him to turn up was just impossible to believe. I said "Yeah, it's Saturday. We're supposed to be meeting at noon, right?"

He hung up on me.

Needless to say, I didn't end up renting the place.

I found the whole Diana thing to be little more than mildly sad news. She never meant much to me in life - though I did once get an up close if very brief glimpse of her in real life, which made me smile (she went past me in a car). But my reaction was pretty much "Wow, really? That's a real shame." I was way more sad at the death of Robin Williams, or Terry Pratchett, or any number of other famous people that I cared more about.

But that experience brought it home to me that people who never met her and didn't know her at all were actually genuinely upset by her death, as if she had been a family member. I find that kind of weird, to be honest, but it takes all sorts.

Anyway, that's about as close as I get to having an interesting story about Princess Diana.

I think one of the reasons people were so upset was they could relate, suddenly we had a royal that was on our level, had problems, had a shitty marriage, all the things commoners have  she also wasn't afraid to show her feelings, it made her approachable.  But the main reason is her boys, I think people felt for her boys. Suddenly they were going to be enfolded by the big bad wolf and lose any humanity they had...thankfully that didn't happen but that was how people felt at the time.