Were you not tense about the first Glasgow derby of the season, due to be played that afternoon at Celtic Park?
With Liverpool v Newcastle due to be played that afternoon as well it promised to be a bumper afternoon of television football to miss out on as I planned on attending the Mayo v Offaly All-Ireland football semi-final followed by the PopMart show by U2 at Lansdowne Road, both of which plans I fulfilled.
Just a small fógra there. The entire world didn’t go into shock and mourning. I didn’t go into shock or mourning. I viewed the mass hysteria with some disdain.
So say we all
As you drove a white Fiat Punto into a shipping container with a Panama hat on the passenger seat, killed the ignition and took off the surgical gloves
Mention of Padraig Harrington, he was playing in the Munich Open on that fateful day. Coincidentally I was in Munich on 31 August 1997. Not for the golf, I hasten to add.
I went into an Irish pub in the Bavarian capital for a spot of Sunday lunch and to watch Mayo v Offaly in the All Ireland Football Semi Final. Once proceedings had concluded in Croke Park, I wandered over to another section of the pub where the footix usually gathered to watch the second half of the Sky Sports Super Sunday feature game. If memory serves me correctly Liverpool were scheduled to play Newcastle as they are 25 years on to the day.
The soccer wasn’t on, Sky News was on. I enquired as to why they weren’t showing the soccer, only to be greeted with the shattering news. I didn’t own a mobile phone at that stage. I was resisting what I felt was just a bit of a fad. I went out and bought my first mobile phone a week later.
Princess Diana was very famous, very very famous, probably the most famous person in Britain - much more famous than, say, Kate Middleton is now - so I was fairly shocked to be woken up by my mother on the two seater couch I had uncomfortably fallen asleep on for the night to be told that Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris overnight and yer man Dodi was dead as well.
So I was shocked - but I didn’t go into shock.
I found it sad but I didn’t go into mourning - maybe a bit similar to how I felt when Ray Wilkins died, but probably not as sad as I felt when Uaneen Fitzsimons died.
I think the mass public displays of grief and anger were guilty projection by the British public. The British public felt guilty that they had sort of hounded Diana to death, that while she was alive they had feasted on her public persona, ridiculed her and vilified her, and they now had to make amends by behaving a bit like the “mourners” in the officially released North Korean propaganda when Kim Il-Sung had died in 1994. But simultaneously, they had to deny to themselves that they had had any hand, act or part in her death, even in an indirect way. Sort of how posters on an online platform might feel if somebody had taken their own life following vicious abuse they had taken on that platform.
The way out of this was to blame the paparazzi, who were indeed partly (though indirectly) to blame in a very real way. Then when the public very quickly decided they wanted to keep on buying tabloid newspapers and feasting on public figures and their personas, their anger switched to the Queen.
Some months later, when Elton John was no longer at number one and Posh and Becks had become the new obsession of the paparazzi, the British public started to feel guilty about how they had vilified the Queen, and ever since then have treated her as a deity in an effort to atone for their treatment of her in the weeks following Diana’s death, again while simultaneously denying to themselves that they ever vilified her in a hysterical fashion.
I suppose the whole thing was a sort of demonstration about how there is an awful lot of suppressed anger in people and how that anger can be brought to the surface and channeled in a particular way by group behaviour and pied pipers who manipulate behaviour in a particular way.
And that was something we would see again and again and again over the following 25 years.
I might submit this piece to Adam Curtis for advice on the best place to insert the line “But then something strange happened…”
I found out at about 5/6 in the morning coming down off a rake of mitsubishis. Think we did the congo singing ding dong the witch is dead as the effects of the cheap Perotti wine purchased from a nearby 24 hour petrol station kicked in
My oul’ fella took a half day from work on September 11th, 2001 and went out to Howth for a bit of fresh air. He got home at about 8 that evening, pretty much blissfully unaware of major world news events apart from “I thought I overheard people saying something alright…what’s happened?”
No, I was sure that 10-in-a-row would be a formality and Ryder Cup permutations always takes precedence in any case. There was a school of thought that the postponement aided Celtic’s title ambitions, as they were very much finding their feet in the early part of Wim Jansen’s reign. I have no recollection of the All Ireland Football Semi-Final from that day.
@Juhniallio and any other gaeilge officianados, what is the translation of the word above as it’s written?
I presumed it was Tìr làn as in ‘full country’ but they’ve no fada on the I. Presumably because 2 fadas would feel extreme and unpronouncable to normal folk. Whereas the same bunch of highly paid marketing geniuses felt ‘tirlan’ would be pronounced “tur -lan”. That was some few months work they put it.
I know of a lad who earned a rake of money by giving the insurance company Aon its name. Two insurance companies in the US merged and the new CEO Pat Ryan an Irish American came to Ireland to seek out a new name. Me laddo met him and suggested Aon meaning One in the Gaelic. A five figure fee (a lot of twine in those days) ensued and was gratefully paid.
That’s a lovely piece. My own view was that she had become a legover for the rich and famous so I wasn’t especially bothered either way.
I think it’s a lovely piece too.
I heard the news pretty much as it was reported through the night as I was awake all that night with an excruciating earache from a summer (my last) of competitive swimming. Swim training is lonely, all you see are tiles.
The pictures of her young sons walking behind the coffin made me sad.
I think that school of thought was a good school. Mind you it didn’t look like such a good school when Rangers were 1-0 up in injury time in the rearranged match in November.
Myself and my friend who attended the Mayo v Offaly game (we got very wet on the Canal End, very very wet and I still had Lansdowne Road to attend later on) briefly debated whether there would be a minute’s silence for Diana and we both very quickly agreed there would be none.
But I’m sorry there wasn’t just to see what the reaction would have been. This of course was in the days when not every game was preceded by a minute’s silence for the late dog which belonged to the sister of the kitman of one of the competing teams (ar dheis dé go raibh a h-anam dilís).
You are correct in that the final day of Ryder Cup qualification and the immediate announcement of the captain’s two wild card picks was always a dramatic day. 11 years later to the day I recall radio discussion following the very attractive All-Ireland football semi-final double header being dominated by Nick Faldo’s decision to omit Darren Clarke and pick Ian Poulter instead. The Irish sports radio fraternity were outraged.
Eamon D’Arcy’s fatal decision to skip playing the German Open/BMW Open/whatever tournament it was in 1991, which was the final qualification tournament, on the assumption that he would qualify - and that even in the unlikely event he didn’t he’d be named as a wild card - also sticks in the mind. I think prime D’Arcy would have nailed that final putt that Bernhard Langer missed in that fateful final singles match at Kiawah Island and then would have done a succession of little fist pumps to himself. Instead he never played in the Ryder Cup again. On such decisions does history turn.
I was drinking in Olly Morgan’s in Warsaw that night. Got home around 3am and there was something on BBC World about a car crash. Fell asleep in the chair. When I woke up in the morning she was dead. RIP.
Don’t torment yourself too much - there wasn’t a whole lot you could have done about it.
We all nod off in armchairs after a gallon or two.
Then it was three days of shit telly, and the seeds of the end of the UK, so pluses and minuses
I got engaged the day of the funeral.