Clive James reflects on his friendship with Princess Diana, who died on this day in 1997.
No, my mother cried. No, no, oh no. I was the witness of her distress, I couldn’t help her, and I had been helpless ever since. I sometimes thought, I said, that everything I had ever written, built, or achieved had been in order to offset that corrosive guilt, and that I loved the world of women because I feared the world of men. Diana touched my wrist, and that was it: we were both six years old.
No, I didn’t figure all that out straight-away, but as time went on it became more apparent to me that I was her patient. I missed her after that first lunch, with a mild version of the forlorn longing I have seen among friends of mine when their shrinks go on holiday. So I did something so presumptuous I still don’t believe I had the brass neck to go through with it.to lunch.
No, she wasn’t always the straight goods. She often pretended. She would listen to advice and warnings that—as you’d later discover—had been rendered obsolete by what she had already done, and pretend to consider them. Then, when the news came out, you found that she had been watching you lead yourself up the garden path. It could hurt.
No, she never took my advice even once. Well, just once. Before she went to Japan on her big solo diplomatic trip, she asked me what would be the best thing she could do there, apart from all the hospitals and stuff. She knew that I was a student of the Japanese language and Japanese literature, and she thought I might have some nifty scheme up my sleeve. I told her I did, but it wouldn’t be easy.
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