Diana

A melancholy anniversary today – that of the death, in 1997, of Diana, Princess of Wales. I remember lying in bed that night, dozing and following the barely believable story as it unfolded on the BBC World Service. It was clear from the start that the BBC had got their response wrong and had hugely underestimated the impact of this death on so many 'ordinary people'. Travelling in to work that morning, hours after the death had been confirmed, I could tell that something very big and strange was already under way – spontaneous, unrestrained public mourning on a scale we hadn't seen in our lifetimes. People were already making their way to Kensington Palace with sheaves of flowers, at the beginning of what was to become an ever more febrile, ever more extravagant round-the-clock display of grief, one result of which was a mountain of festering flowers, many of them rotting away in their cellophane sheaths. But that was all to come. When I arrived at work that morning – yes, at the Daily Mail – the shock and grief were palpable, and there were ashen faces (something you rarely see in real life) all around. Diana had been 'one of theirs' and they (unlike the BBC) knew just how big this death was, how hard it was going to hit, and what an extraordinary outpouring of grief it was going to provoke. 
   Diana, alas, has no fitting memorial – and her posthumous fate reflects a general decline to somewhere near rock bottom in the art of memorialising the dead. When the popular Queen Mary II, who shared the throne with William III, died, her death was marked by Purcell's sublimely beautiful funeral music. Diana's musical memorial was Elton John's mawkish update of 'Candle in the Wind' – 'Goodbye England's Rose'. When, in 1817, the much loved Princess Charlotte died, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn son, the nation was plunged into Diana-scale grief, and that feeling found artistic form in a grand, heaven-aspiring monument by M.C Wyatt – 

Diana's best memorial is probably the much derided water feature in Kensington Gardens – at least it has some life, unlike her sculptural memorial. When this was eventually unveiled, 24 years after her death, it turned out to be an absolute horror. Who is this creepy transvestite social worker rounding up waifs and strays? Diana? What? Really?!

Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. An age that routinely denies death, sweeps it away out of sight, and increasingly rejects even the very idea of a funeral is not going to be much good at producing memorials, especially as the art of figurative sculpture is also in decline. Just another sign of a culture that has lost its bearings and is withering on the vine.