Morbid Anniversary

Anniversaries and such things have been on my mind of late.  Partly because I'm feeling extremely smug about having correctly remembered a friend's birthday (an increasingly rare event - I even have to be reminded of my various great nieces' birthdays: usually by them), but mainly because the media keeps banging on about how we're approaching the twentieth anniversary of Princess Diana's death.  I always find this desire to fixate on the anniversaries' of peoples' deaths perplexing, if not downright morbid.  To be quite frank, it borders on necrophilia.  In fact, the whole cult thing which seems to surround dead celebrities is, aside from being downright creepy, in itself, a form of necrophilia.  Still, I've no doubt that, over the next couple of weeks, the media will be full of celebrities and reality TV stars telling us what they were doing when they heard that Princess Diana had died.  Actually, I can tell you what I was doing when I heard that she'd been involved in an accident: I was watching a late night screening of the English language version of Borsalino on BBC1, when, during the casino robbery sequence, it was interrupted for a newsflash.  If finished watching the film when it resumed and went to bed.  When I woke up the next morning, every radio station was playing mournful music, so I assumed she'd died.

I'm sure that we'll have lots of 'what if?' programmes, speculating on what might have happened if she hadn't died.  Or if the car Princess Diana was in crashed into a bus full of school children.  Or, if when the car crashed, the boot lid sprung open and half a dozen naked illegal immigrants kept as sex slaves by the Princess jumped out and ran off.  Of course, the big 'what if' is what would have happened if she'd lived, a divorced Charles had married Camilla, then the Queen died and he took the throne with Camilla as his Queen.  Would Diana have tried to force her way into the Coronation and Westminster Abbey, demanding to be Queen consort instead of Camilla?  (There's sort of an historical precedent for this: George IV's estranged wife Princess Caroline of Brunswick tried to gate crash his coronation and assert herself as Queen consort).  Then again, we should probably speculate as to what would have happened if Diana had survived the crash, but was so severely traumatised that she became a psychopathic killer hell bent on murdering various members of the Royal family.  Would she have taken an axe to the Queen Mother?   Or garrotted the Duke of Edinburgh?  Or even decapitated Her Majesty with a sword?  These questions deserve an answer, I feel.