Picture: Paul Cooper
On the night Diana, Princess of Wales died, I was staying in north Yorkshire. Through the small hours, people in London were trying to call me, to send me off to Paris to report on the tragedy. In vain.
My old-fashioned pager was, for some reason, lodged in a pocket of a spare pair of trousers in the car boot. Unknown to me, I was in one of those areas of the country where my mobile phone, switched on and resting all night on a bedside table, had no signal.
When one of my hosts went down to the village shop for the Sunday papers, there was nothing in them about what had happened in the tunnel beneath La Place de l'Alma long after northern editions had been printed. She heard the news, word of mouth, from the newsagent.
My friend's husband knocked on the bedroom door a little later, offering cups of tea and the following words, which I remember verbatim to this day: "Princess Diana and Dodi have been killed in a car crash in Paris while being chased by paparazzi."
Ten years on, I also remember the office being unexpectedly forgiving of its chief reporter's failure to respond to all the calls. We agreed that I would soak in the wall-to-wall radio coverage on the long drive back to London and pull together the main story for the next day's newspaper.
For the next few days, I followed the extraordinary series of events that unfolded as the nation reacted to Diana's death. A republican-minded friend in the north was in the tiniest of minorities when he said: "Oh, three people killed in a Saturday night car crash - very sad, but we get that kind of thing quite a lot at weekends up here, too."
The outpouring of grief, the crowds on the Mall, the flowers, the hostility towards anyone associated with the press at any level and then the collective anger directed at the Queen until she returned from her Balmoral holiday. I will never forget any of it.
At the funeral, I was as moved as anyone by that wave of applause that drifted in from the crowds outside Westminster Abbey as Diana's brother, Charles, made his famous speech, and spread to the congregation. And then, I finally travelled to Paris to research the bulkiest article I have written for any editor: approaching 4,000 words beneath the self-explanatory headline City of Rumour.
The rumours, or many of them, have persisted. Despite the fairly obvious conclusion that Diana was killed by a drunk driver charging at reckless speed into a potentially dangerous city centre underpass, plenty of people remain attached to a more sinister theory.
Dodi's father, Mohamed, claims the accident was no accident at all, but the result of an Establishment plot to stop an English princess marrying a Muslim. Impossible as it is to develop a coherent argument in support of such a proposition, given the specifics of the crash, it is one that appeals to many.
I once suggested that in any gathering of, say, five adults, two would believe in the conspiracy theory. If the ratio has altered, I imagine that would probably have been in an upward direction.
No one reading this should expect any strong views on how to apportion blame for the Charles and Diana break-up. I am not a royalist but have respect for some of Charles's works, just as I admired what Diana did in her charitable activities. But I do not have a voracious appetite for the detail of their unhappy marriage.
The tenth anniversary has inevitably been seized upon as an opportunity for further blanket coverage of that accident in Paris at the end of August 1997, of Diana's life and legacy and their impact on the Royal family.
Even today's Var-Matin runs one picture on the front and seven more inside, and Diana appears in all but one of them. France 2 - that is to say French state-owned television - broadcast every moment of today's memorial service live from London, with contributions from my old Paris confrère, the Guardian's Jon Henley, in that impeccable French of his.
All that is reasonable enough. Diana had astonishing, universal appeal and it is hardly surprising that her relatively short life and violent death should continue to interest and intrigue people all over the world.
It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say the press had taken to heart any useful lessons from the circumstances of the accident. Freelance photographers still pursue the rich and famous to excessive and sometimes outrageous lengths, and they are clearly able to find a ready market for their shots.
It does not even alter things greatly to remember that the rich and famous frequently, and for their own reasons, invade their own privacy (as we saw in that French TV programme I wrote about the other day). The paparazzi's behaviour on the night of Diana's death was disgraceful by any standards of ordinary decency.
But the paparazzi did not kill her. The chauffeur-turned-chauffard, Henri Paul, presumably believed he was doing what was required of him when he sped off in such a dangerous fashion, but to what end was that duty imposed? To avoid pictures being taken. More pictures. But just pictures.
Why was it so crucial for the couple to stay out of the limelight for a small part of one day after they had spent weeks being photographed everywhere during their most visible Mediterranean holiday? Why did they not simply stay the night, out of range of the snappers' lenses, at the Fayed-owned Ritz where they had dined?
Picture: Paul Cooper
That would have been the surest way to avoid being photographed. But three people perished because they chose another way, high-speed escape from the pests gathered outside the hotel. Not for the first time, I offer the thought that no photograph, however unwelcome, is worth dying to prevent being taken.
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