Royal Pain

When I was visiting Chicago in early May, I watched The Queen with my Dad's wife Carol. It had just come out on DVD; Carol wanted to see it and I was also curious about it.

Drake and I completely missed the media coverage of Diana's death. At the end of August 1997 we had just started a month-long tour of Italy. We didn't hear about Diana's death until a day or two after it happened. We were in Venice at the time,  seated in an osteria next to some reporters covering the then-in-progress Venice Film Festival. We heard the news from them, but subsequently didn't hear much about it. We weren't around televisions, and didn't seek out any English-language papers or magazine coverage of it. I was sure the reaction in England and the U.S. was huge, but I didn't realize how huge (in England at least) until I saw The Queen.

I was never much of a Diana follower, but honestly, after watching The Queen I was intrigued by the clear impact (at least in death) she had had on the English monarchy. And so, in my recent travels I quite spontaneously bought The Diana Chronicles at the airport. Not a book I would normally pick up, but I had read good reviews of it in both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Honestly, the dysfunction on both sides (Diana and the Royal Family) was painful to read. Talk about a doomed match (Charles and Diana). He's a 31 man-about-town...and a quirky intellectual type. She's 19, under-educated and with almost no life experience. They had only seen each other 13 times before the wedding. And he as much admitted in a post-engagement interview that he wasn't in love with her. I guess it's an indication of the pull of the monarchy that the wedding went forward despite warning signs all over the place (and family/friends of both Charles and Diana discouraging the match).

It's also clear that whatever the legitimate traumas underlying Diana's self-destructive private behavior, she seemed to be unavoidably marching towards her own early death.

In the end, I had some sympathy for Charles, and I'm not quite sure why given his heartless (and unfaithful) behavior. Maybe he seemed more a victim of circumstance having been born into the Royal Family (rather than pursuing it, naively, as Diana did).

I'm now back to my regularly-scheduled reading, Empire by Niall Ferguson. Drake got this for me, after he listened to it on audio. It's a fascinating account of the rise and fall of the British empire. And definitely though-provoking given the role the U.S. plays in the world today.