DIANA AND ME
“I remember it taking some time to comprehend. Diana, the tragic, gorgeous, wronged, people’s princess seemed too manufactured a figure to suffer such a mortal thing as death. That it happened walking distance from where I then stood only made it all the more unreal.” ELISE POTTER remembers the fateful time 20 years ago when her life intersected with the death of the most famous woman in the world.
MY first impressions of Paris was that its buildings had paper-thin walls.
It was our first night in the city and my jet-lagged rest had been disturbed by wailing sirens and what my sleep-deprived brain interpreted as early Sunday morning radio broadcasts.
Our cheap-as-chips hostel, brilliantly located in the 16th arrondissement, had not overly impressed me when checking in the afternoon before and I had apportioned blame on my disturbed sleep to both it and the iconically narrow Parisian streets. A cadet journalist barely out of uni, I had no idea the world’s biggest story was happening on my doorstep.
There was no social media in 1997. The internet and email was a new thing for all but the uber tech-savvy and certainly not readily available to a working class cadet journalist who had never even owned a home computer. This was long before to “google” had become a verb and while today — after a 20-year career in journalism and access to instant news via an ever-present iPhone — those sirens would be enough to prompt at the very least bedside investigation, Paris in August 1997 was a whole different story.
What I do remember about that fateful night — and the morning after — was the sirens, the radio (or, on reflection, more likely television) broadcast voices speaking a fluent French I had no idea how to interpret, and the Canadian we met in the hostel foyer who would become our unofficial tour guide on one of the most surreal days of my life.