The response to Jade’s death reminded me how puzzled I was by Diana mania

It was a badly timed death, a departure which, ironically, scorned the important press deadlines. The best time to die, if you are a celebrity, is at three o’clock in the afternoon of a weekday — in time for the early evening news bulletins and the next morning’s papers. This, however, was a Saturday into a Sunday, a time when even Christ might have died and there’d be nobody sentient around to pick up the story.

I was a bit drunk, having spent the evening out drinking with my then girlfriend and a bunch of friends whose names I cannot subsequently recall. Temporary drink friends, I suppose. There had been loads of drink, gallons of the stuff, enough units to make the present chief medical officer Liam Donaldson suffer a sudden and possibly fatal embolism. Later, I climbed into bed with this raw clanging in my brain, a cacophonous fugue of ur-noise; I remember it well.

We all remember the moment, just like with Kennedy (for those old enough). As I lay my head on the pillow I heard another, different, clanging, at least it seemed distinct from the internal clanging. It had an insistency about it, an urgency; it seemed like a reproof. ‘Is that the phone?’ I eventually asked my then girlfriend, semi-comatose beside me. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s just your f***ing tinnitus again.’ That seemed a fair enough analysis at the time, so I tried to shut it out. But it was still there, hammering away, every few moments. Brrrrring brrring brrring. Then I fell asleep, these two fugues combining usefully, in the end, as a sort of lullaby. Then I woke up at lunchtime the next day, and Princess Diana was dead. That noise, that external noise, was not my ‘f***ing tinnitus’, as it turned out, but my office calling to say: ‘Wake up! You’ll never guess what’s happened now.