In the early hours of 31 August 1997, twenty-nine years ago today, a car carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed crashed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris. Both died, as did the driver, Henri Paul. Diana's bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured and was the only person in the car to survive. The investigation that followed was argued over for decades, and I do not intend to argue it here.
What I remember, from a distance, is not the inquiries but the pavements. In the days afterwards people came to the gates of Kensington Palace and St James's with flowers, and then more people came, until the bouquets lay deep and the cellophane made a sound underfoot. Strangers queued for hours to sign books of condolence. Many of them had never met her and could not have said exactly why they had come, only that they wanted to stand there for a while.
Three people died in a tunnel at about that hour of the night when a city is nearly quiet. That is the fact of the day, and it is enough.
The queue for the condolence books ran for hours and mostly in silence, which is a rare thing in a crowd that size. People brought children, and waited, and went home again.
In 1987 she opened a ward at Middlesex Hospital and shook hands with a man with AIDS, without gloves, in front of cameras. Transmission routes were already understood by then, but the gesture reached people that the evidence had not, and it changed how many were willing to speak about the illness.