The response to Jade’s death reminded me how puzzled I was by Diana mania

It was a badly timed death, a departure which, ironically, scorned the important press deadlines. The best time to die, if you are a celebrity, is at three o’clock in the afternoon of a weekday — in time for the early evening news bulletins and the next morning’s papers. This, however, was a Saturday into a Sunday, a time when even Christ might have died and there’d be nobody sentient around to pick up the story.

I was a bit drunk, having spent the evening out drinking with my then girlfriend and a bunch of friends whose names I cannot subsequently recall. Temporary drink friends, I suppose. There had been loads of drink, gallons of the stuff, enough units to make the present chief medical officer Liam Donaldson suffer a sudden and possibly fatal embolism. Later, I climbed into bed with this raw clanging in my brain, a cacophonous fugue of ur-noise; I remember it well.