I forgot to mention that we went to see The Hope Of The States last week. They were fantastic, I was initially disappointed in their debut album, hearing it live and without the slight over-production there seemed to be on record, it really hit the heights they've always promised to.
That's not the reason I remembered the gig however. Or the reason why I'm putting this blog in, before I've put up those pictures I promised (which I'll do later. Honest).
On the way to the HOTS (right kids!) gig, we drove past a lorry cab on the motorway. It didn't have a trailer attached so we could see in all its glory the hand-drawn mural on the back of the cab.
Somebody with a semblance of artistic talent had drawn a night-time scene of the sky, stars twinkling and blazing. In the middle of these stars was painted Princess Diana, who I didn't recognise at first until I saw underneath her was written 'Goodbye England's rose'. What I liked about it was that she was painted in ghostly white, to empathise her immense deadness. She was smiling, she was looking after us all, from her place in heaven. Wherever a fellow Englander was in trouble, she'd be there, sorting things out by denying that any beloved Englander would date-rape a girl in a foreign bar. Not an Englishman, oh no, not with Saint Di as their guardian of good.
If that wasn't horrendous enough, beneath Di were two other people, looking up at her ghostly visage with much awe. These were Elton John, and….George Michael.
Now I know why Elton John was there, a lifelong favourite of Di's, he was also responsible for the most inappropriate, sickly, tawdry, tasteless and gaudy tribute song of all time. If they'd have re-released the Dave Clark Five's 'Bits N' Pieces' as a tribute for those killed on September 11th, I don't think it would have been as utterly wrong as Elton John's effort. Well, maybe…
I guess Georgios was there as Di was a known fan of Wham, and of George himself. As all dull thirty-something middle-class blondes have to be by law. The same who have now abandoned Georgios Michaelopolopolos for Dido and Keane, who are far less likely to be caught tossing off in front of an LA cop in a public convenience…though I wish that wasn't the case.
Elton was wearing the hat he wore in the 'Sacrifice' video, you know, the one that looks like a small wholemeal baguette. He was probably wearing one as it looked like a cold night, what with the clear sky and ghostly visions and everything.
Anyway…
WHAT THE FUCK?
Why would somebody do that? Why would somebody not feel slightly embarrassed almost 7 years after the event, to realise that the whole nation grieving for some privileged woman like she was the fucking messiah, was slightly inapt? That to elevate a woman who wore fancy dresses at parties THAT YOU'D NEVER BE FUCKING ALLOWED AT to be something more worthwhile than the hundreds who die every day in pain, fear and destitution is so fucking obscene!
To be whipped into a storm of anguish and grief at the time was bad enough, but to not feel even a semblance of shame so many years later is just plain wrongness.
Jesus, 1997 was my first year working for BAe. As they are a bunch of twats, they fiddled it so I only had 7 days holiday to last me from February through till December. I managed to save them up (something I can't do anymore) and booked the first week off in September. I'd been really looking forward to it until I woke up on Sunday 31st August 1997.
I wandered downstairs to find my mum watching grim sounding news reports. She told me Princess Di had been killed in a car accident. I don't know if my mum expected me to burst into tears or commit suicide, but my first statement of 'I hope they don't cancel the Liverpool match' was not what she wanted to hear. They did cancel it as well, the bastards. Something they didn't do 4 years later when 3000 people were killed, as opposed to 3.
I played Sunday football that morning for The Fighting Cock. We had a one minute silence before the game, broken by really piss-poor jokes being made by members of each team.
Halfway through the game, stood bored and unloved on the left wing, a man passed me with his dog and said 'you ought to be ashamed'. To this day I don't know if he was upset at us playing football on such a sad day, or the fact that I was playing yet another ineffective game for "The Cock".
On the way home it dawned on me what my week would entail, solemn news reports, people wailing in grief for the death of a lady they'd never met, but who had once held a leper's cock and dug up some "landmines", so you know she was worthy of their tears.
Summer 1997 had started with the big spazzy love-in that was "cool Britannia", something which seemed to happen in a faraway never-never-land which obviously hadn't touched Lancashire. We were all touchy-feeling, a big gang of English people, and now here they were in London and on my tele, at the end of that summer, spending more on fucking flowers then they'd ever give to a charity. Even a charity for landmine disabled lepers.
I'd observed it all with an uneasy detachment, trying not to whip myself into a rage at the illogic of it all. On the day of the funeral, I tried to resist by playing music really loud music until I realised this was upsetting my ma. I went for a walk around Fleetwood instead, where my mood spilled over rather quickly.
Like all towns, Fleetwood has various monuments built after the first or Second World War to commemorate people in the town who'd gone away and never returned. Every year the wreaths seemed to decrease in number and vandalism increased. On this day, Fleetwood was a ghost town and I was drawn to one of the aforementioned monuments in a churchyard. The thing that had dragged me there was the sight from afar of approximately one hundred bunches of flowers placed at the bottom of the monument for Diana, "Queen of Hearts".
Why there? Why place flowers for a dead celebrity at the base of a sad monument to the death of a couple of hundred local men? Men whose lives had not one iota of similarity with that of Di's. I was actually taken aback at how insulting I found it.

Anyway, a few months later I did a search for my name on the internet. The only result returned which was actually 'me' was a note my ma had put on a condolence list for Di (and oddly signed it from my email address). She'd written 'R.I.P, wherever you are'. Why did she write that? Where was Di?
Maybe I should phone her up and tell her that I've found her on the back of a lorry cab.