The Day Princess Di Confided in Yours Truly
By JL Copeland
Featuring fresh-faced 10-year-old JL’s delightful meeting with the Princess of Hearts and my earliest realisation that The Press are a bunch of twa*s.
Here it is, the big one. The Great Celebrity Anecdote that has their eyes popping from their silly little heads.
The day Princess Diana confided in me.
Here we go.
Diana’s Anchor.
That’s what they* call me.
* By ‘they’ I mean the imaginary morris-dancing gerbils playing FarmVille inside my fractured mind.
I guess if I was a former butler with an attic-full of her tat I’d ‘acquired’ over the years, I could have wrung every penny out of that moniker on the daytime TV circuit.
Alas, Princess Diana confided in me only once.
I’ll try to keep this one as brief as possible as I know you all have short attention spans like me (these days, getting through a birthday card is a slog).
On October 1st, 1990, Princess Diana visited the YMCA centre at Lakeside, Cumbria, UK. Waiting for her was a gaggle of grinning school children, including yours truly.
Why me?
Diana was so famous that if they’d asked, ‘Who wants to meet Princess Di?’ at the local schools, every grubby little oik would have raised their hand or been ‘volunteered’ by an awful, grasping parent.
So, they chose the two eldest from each school.
In a class so small we had to borrow pupils from the lower years for our five-a-side football team and with a December birthday, I’d hit the jackpot.
I was probably happy to get out of maths and the temporary classroom we spent that year in: a portacabin fragranced with rat urine and mould.
I remember that morning we went on a nose-bleed high aerial runway at the YMCA (this is relevant, as you’ll see in a mo), which for any ten-year-old was kickin’ (nineties slang was the best, sorry, worst).
Then Princess Di’s party turned up.
Guys in suits.
Apart from our headteacher, I’d never seen anyone in a suit apart from on TV. This was the boondocks of rural North-West England. Removing your shoes to enter someone’s home was considered ‘posh.’
Picture a line of very serious yet bemused kids: some picking their noses, others wondering if we were going to get coke and candy out of this, as the blonde bob came ever closer.
Apparently, Diana’s hairstyle was called a ‘feathered shag.’ If you had asked for that at a hairdresser’s in our area, they would have assumed you wanted to interfere with a chicken.
I digress.
She didn’t talk to every kid, but she stopped when she saw me.
How could she not? With my chubby little cheeks, duckling fluff of blonde hair and—too close together—baby blues?
‘And what have you been doing today?’ asked the Princess of Wales.
‘I went on that aerial runway,’ I replied, and pointed to the wire running over a bay in Lake Windermere, giving it my best puffed-out-chest prince impression.
Look how brave and cool I am, Princess. I’ll fight you a dragon.
‘Really? That one? Was it fun?’
‘Yes. You should have a go.’
Then came the moment Princess Diana confided in me.
Leaning forward, she whispers in my ear.
‘Don’t tell anyone, but I think I’d be too scared to try it.’
And she’s gone.
Delightful, right? A thoroughly satisfying GCA (Great Celebrity Anecdote—more on those HERE).
Then the f*cking press stick their oar in.
I don’t recall speaking to a journalist. However, in the newspaper later that week, I’d apparently told the crusty, pencil-squeezing toad that Diana was ‘alright.’
Now, as a ten-year-old, I wasn’t the most articulate whipper snapper.
I know, with the scintillating prose I spew forth these days, you’re saying, ‘No JL, we don’t believe you.’
But being—no doubt—intimidated by the mic or nicotine-stained notepad thrust in my face, I wouldn’t have dared put anything but a positive spin on my brush with royalty.
That ‘alright’ would have had a nice little burst of rising intonation on the second syllable.
Chuck in a bright smile, some raised eyebrows and my cute little cherub-like mush.
Again, positive, right?
And yet that single word condemned me to cacophony of tut-tutting.
This is what they printed:
I told you.
While mine and Diana’s lives have taken very *ahem* different paths, I’m sure there was one fact we would have both agreed on:
The Press.
Bunch of twa*s.
JL
PS: You can find out how to craft your very own Great Celebrity Anecdote HERE.
Stay tuned next time for more likely twaddle, including where I try to find out if these first two posts on my gleaming new website are moving towards a point. You lucky, lucky people.
And if you’re interested in receiving a heady mix of bullsh*t, the bawdy and the bizarre, you know what to do:
