Embarrassing your children is a key maternal skill – as Diana knew

‘Of course, as a son I would say this, she was the best mum in the world,” says Prince Harry in tonight’s documentary, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy.

Diana, Princess of Wales, was 36 when she died in 1997. While her sons have grown into men, she remains a young woman, frozen forever at the height of her beauty. Yet of all the things for which she is remembered – champion of the suffering, icon of a particularly dodgy fashion era – we may imagine that the epitaph she would have cherished is the one every mother covets: we all long to be the best mum in the world.

In her sons’ memories, the Diana version of this accolade involved the usual motherly qualities: she was warm, she was fun, she listened to Enya CDS in the car, she missed no opportunity to embarrass her offspring …

Embarrassing your children is a key maternal skill, curiously unmentioned by the parenting manuals, perhaps because – unlike breastfeeding or potty training – it comes quite naturally. Half the time, we don’t even realise we are doing it.

If you were to ask my own dear son for his childhood memories, I suspect that most of them would involve mortification of some kind: the time I took along a book to beguile the insufferable tedium of his school speech day. The time (far worse) when I took a book to a West Ham match. My terrible clothes (“do you have to dress like a 15-yearold?” he said plaintively last summer, gazing in dismay at my skinny jeans and One Direction hi-tops, an emergency holiday purchase, embraced for their son-embarrassing potential.)

Yet consider the affection with which Prince Harry recalls his mother’s penchant for dressing the young Princes in “weird shorts and little shiny shoes with the old clip on. I just think, ‘How could you do that to us?’” But, he adds, “I sure as hell am going to dress my kids up the same way.”

Ah, there it is – the squirm of affectionate unease that wriggles its way down the generations. If we didn’t embarrass our children, what stories would they have to tell about us to their own children? For as long as anyone remembers them, they are our fragile claim to immortality.

Pity the poor Venetians: they are struggling with the horror of living in the most beautiful city in the world. The noise, my dear! And the people! Particularly loathed by the citizens of Venice are the vast cruise ships that ply the Giudecca in high season, from which hordes of passengers briefly emerge, spending little, but leaving a trail of litter.

As a fellow resident of a Unesco World Heritage Site, I sympathise. I used to think that one of the charms of living in Greenwich was waking to find some enormous boat parked yards from my window, but after several such visitations in a few weeks I have changed my mind.

It’s not the insistent engine hum that I mind, or the panicky small-hours yelling as the behemoth inches into its watery parking space under the supervision of a couple of Thames tugs. But the deafening early-morning Tannoy announcements from what is, in effect, a supersized floating Butlins would drive the gentlest soul to thoughts of scuttling.

I can’t wait for winter, when the only sound is the sloshing of the tide and the mournful honking of the resident Egyptian geese.