Cry Me A Water Feature

‘GIVEN the ocean of tears shed over the death of Princess Diana, it was always right and proper that she’d be remembered in something wet.

‘So the water goes round and round without doing very much?’

However, the water at the new Diana, Princess of Wales Fountain doesn’t cascade and crash like one of her emoting fans did at her funeral seven years ago; it simply bubbles and blubs its way through a course of what looks like granite guttering.

Little wonder then that, with this similarity evident to all, the Queen used yesterday’s official opening of London’s newest water feature to commend the design team and those ‘who have realised their concept with such care and craftsmanship’.

But we are all in the gutter, as Oscar Wilde once said, and yesterday the Queen was looking not down to the mud through which her family have been dragged over the Diana legacy but up to the 1,000-strong crowd and dignitaries in attendance.

The Mail says Her Majesty even took care to write the speech herself, striving to ensure that her words in praise of her deceased daughter-in-law would not be not deemed ‘superficial’.

And, in case any Mail readers missed the exhortation, the paper reproduces it in its entirety.

Liz talks of Diana’s ‘shrewd ability to size up those she met’, ‘the happiness she gave to my grandsons’, and how she was a ‘remarkable human being’.

Words delivered with no hint of frost or grudge, but with what sounded to the Mail like heartfelt feeling.

She even stopped in front of Earl Spencer, Diana’s loving brother, who shamelessly used Diana’s funeral to have dig at the Windsors, to ask: ‘I hope you feel satisfied with that?’

‘Yes, Ma’am, more than satisfied,’ came his reply.

Which makes us wonder what’s changed in the intervening years since Diana’s death to soften the Queen.

Perhaps she’s right when she simply says that ‘memories mellow with the passing of the years’.

However, she might have been just happy to have had the final laugh. After all, a piece of guttering is, if not apt, then at least so very amusing…’

Posted: 7th, July 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink