Diana. Even now, twenty years on, her very name is electrifying...

THE protocol was five pages long, years old and was pinned to the wall of the studio. What to do if the Queen Mother dies when you’re on air. It was the summer of 1997 and after the birth of my first child, I had recently moved from weekdays to a Sunday morning show on BBC Radio London.

But I’d taken that weekend off. I was going back to Dublin to have my tiny, premature daughter christened. In the small hours of the morning of the Christening, I was lying awake in bed in my parents’ house feeding the baby, when my dad popped his head around the door. ‘Princess Diana’s been killed in a car crash,’ he said.

It was one of those rare moments in life that didn’t compute. If my dad had prefaced his solemn announcement by asking me to guess what he was about to say, I think I’d still be in that bed now. Nothing about it made sense. She was young, fit, wealthy, she had a charmed life. But also, she didn’t belong in this day. This was the day I was having the baby that almost killed me christened, in my home town. Feck her. This was my day.

It was the first prayer the priest said from the altar when we gathered for the Christening a few hours later. It was all anyone could talk about afterwards. In my sister’s house, where we gathered for a small celebration afterwards, Sky News was a constant uninvited guest. It only dawned on me later that had I not chosen August 31 as the date for my daughter’s Christening, it would have been my job to anchor the radio news coverage for BBC London. I wondered about the protocol, about the dusty rack of cartridges in the studio that had been recorded to solemnly mark the passing of a woman who had lived a full life and was almost a century old. Life – and death – are what happens when you’re busy recording obituaries.

I was on the radio for the funeral. Not in London, but in RTÉ, where I was one of a hastily summoned panel, anchored by Marian Finucane. I recall that between commentaries, Marian cried a lot – and I remember being struck by the powerful influence that a woman I’d always regarded as vain and vacuous could have on another fiercely intelligent one, a world away.

And back in London, there seemed to be no end to it. The outpouring of grief, the bewilderment, the shock, the senselessness of it all. Coping with a new baby and maintaining my republicanism generally and my antipathy towards the royal family in particular, I tried to stay apart from it. But one day, I popped her into the baby sling, strapped her to my body and headed for Kensington Palace.

I cannot say what it was like, because in truth, it wasn’t like anything. Not before nor since. Thousands, maybe millions of flowers, all wrapped in a sea of cellophane that had outlasted the wilting blossoms within. It was shiny and strange and eerily quiet, even though there were hundreds of people there, laying their tributes. People who felt they’d known her. People who knew they hadn’t but recognised that tragedy is no respecter of class or privilege.

PEOPLE who simply wanted to mark that a young mother had been taken from two children. At the base of every tree were candles and teddies. Attached to every railing, pictures and poems and endless handwritten tributes to the people’s princess. Here and there, the odd reference to the other two people who had died in that accident in Paris. But mainly her. Here, there and everywhere.

Afterwards, I sat outside a nearby café for an hour and watched the parade of mourners, still in tears almost a fortnight after her death. And I can’t honestly say that I felt an affinity with their grief or with its focus. I can’t honestly say that in death, I revised my critical opinion of Diana. But that day, those weeks, even I knew that something extraordinary had happened, was happening – and that none of us would ever forget where we were right then.

When I went back to work the following weekend, the protocol had been removed from the studio wall. It was never replaced.