Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

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

What do those who mourn Jade Goody think they are mourning, asks Rod Liddle. Do they not have their own dead to bury, to grieve over, to remember?

issue 28 March 2009

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.

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