As I recall I wasn’t alone in my feeling at the time. There was something cloying and artificial about it all, how Elton John changed a few lyrics in a song and made it about Diana instead of Marilyn Monroe, how people were mourning symbol rather than life, how the loss of somebody in possession of beauty and wealth seemed more important than the loss of anybody else. It was a little bit weird to me, but Diana had never spoken to me the way she had clearly spoken to so many others.

I was young at the time and saw our involvement in her life as little more than our involvement in a soap opera. However, since then I’ve had a few mortal scrapes, more than a few, and I have become a father. At 50, sitting in a hospital with sick and scared people, and to suddenly be yanked back into that night was very disarming. It was late, we were all out drinking and looking to fall in love, we were all limitless. But now we are limited, and all I could think of when the scroll went by were those poor boys, their lives spinning and shattered, flash bulbs casting shadows that would last a lifetime, and I felt how real it was, how her fame and beauty and distance from us didn’t make it any less of a tragedy.

As usual, nice work Mr Murray.