Where were you the night that Lady Diana died?

I remember where I was the night that Diana died.  I had returned to Australia in 1996 to pursue an acting career.  At the end of August 1997 I was then actively courting my now current partner, David.  He and his housemates where holding a party at their residence in Ivanhoe.  It was one heck of a rip-roaring party, indeed.

We awoke the following day to the rumour that Princess Diana had died.  We switched on the television to discover that every channel was covering the story.  I couldn't remember when this had ever happened before.  Instantly the rumour became a fact.  We were all pretty shocked.  David had met her twice and this was the first time I had actually heard of the whens and whys.

Reading Piers recollections of the months leading up to that dreadful day is very interesting indeed.  One thing that you have to give Piers credit for, is that he doesn't edit out what a right tit he was when he was top dawg at the mirror, but he also highlights what an amazingly media savvy woman Diana had become in that final year.  Honestly, that lady could outsmart the canniest reporter and twist any story to show her in the right light.

I was never really smitten with Lady Diana's attempt to convince the world that she was a saint.  I am still actually annoyed about the whole lack of seat belt scenario that she go herself into.  I loved what she did to highlight the horror of landmines, though, and overall I think it was a terrible shame that we lost such an ambassador of peace and love, as she styled herself, but I will always remember how she shoved Mother Theresa's obituary to the back pages of every newspaper by dying at just that right time (Piers himself ended up popping MT on page 21 of the Mirror.... page 21!!!)  Just for that, I will always remember Lady Di with great fondness and a smile.

I'm up to 1999 now, still over 250 pages left to cover the next five years of Piers' fabulous life as a newspaperman - I envisage I will spend at least another two Wednesdays before I finish these diaries of his.  Ah well, at least the trip down these memorial lanes are of interest to me.

Tomorrow, it's back into the brilliant musings of Mr Hawkings.  I truly am excited.

Here is the secondary list, as promised.  Tomorrow I hope to create my actual list.  Where I remove all the books I've already read, replace them with the books from the secondary list, and present to the world my challenge.

The Observer Top 100 Books of All Time

#	Title	Author	Daniel Read	David Read
1	Don Quixote	Miguel De Cervantes	No	Yes
2	Pilgrim's Progress	John Bunyan	No	No
3	Robinson Crusoe	Daniel Defoe	yes	Yes
4	Gulliver's Travels	Jonathan Swift	yes	Yes
5	Tom Jones	Henry Fielding	no	Yes
6	Clarissa	Samuel Richardson	no	No
7	Tristram Shandy	Laurence Sterne	no	Yes
8	Dangerous Liaisons	Pierre Choderlos De Laclos	no	No
9	Emma	Jane Austen	no	Yes
10	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	yes	Yes
11	Nightmare Abbey	Thomas Love Peacock	no	No
12	The Black Sheep	Honore De Balzac	no	No
13	The Charterhouse of Parma	Stendhal	no	No
14	The Count of Monte Cristo	Alexandre Dumas	no	Yes
15	Sybil	Benjamin Disraeli	no	Yes
16	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	no	Yes
17	Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte	yes	Yes
18	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte	no	Yes
19	Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackeray	no	Yes
20	The Scarlet Letter	Nathaniel Hawthorne	no	No
21	Moby-Dick	Herman Melville	yes	Yes
22	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	no	Yes
23	The Woman in White	Wilkie Collins	yes	Yes
24	Alice's Adventures In Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	yes	Yes
25	Little Women	Louisa M. Alcott	?	Yes
26	The Way We Live Now	Anthony Trollope	no	No
27	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	no	Yes
28	Daniel Deronda	George Eliot	no	No
29	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	no	Yes
30	The Portrait of a Lady	Henry James	no	Yes
31	Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	yes	Yes
32	Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson	?	Yes
33	Three Men in a Boat	Jerome K. Jerome	no	No
34	The Picture of Dorian Gray	Oscar Wilde	yes	Yes
35	The Diary of a Nobody	George Grossmith	?	No
36	Jude the Obscure	Thomas Hardy	no	No
37	The Riddle of the Sands	Erskine Childers	no	No
38	The Call of the Wild	Jack London	yes	Yes
39	Nostromo	Joseph Conrad	no	No
40	The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame	yes	Yes
41	In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust	no	No
42	The Rainbow	D. H. Lawrence	no	No
43	The Good Soldier	Ford Madox Ford	no	No
44	The Thirty-Nine Steps	John Buchan	no	Yes
45	Ulysses	James Joyce	no	Yes
46	Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	no	No
47	A Passage to India	E. M. Forster	yes	Yes
48	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	yes	Yes
49	The Trial	Franz Kafka	yes	Yes
50	Men Without Women	Ernest Hemingway	no	No
51	Journey to the End of the Night	Louis-Ferdinand Celine	no	No
52	As I Lay Dying	William Faulkner	no	No
53	Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	yes	Yes
54	Scoop	Evelyn Waugh	no	No
55	USA	John Dos Passos	no	No
56	The Big Sleep	Raymond Chandler	no	No
57	The Pursuit Of Love	Nancy Mitford	no	No
58	The Plague	Albert Camus	yes	Yes
59	Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell	yes	Yes
60	Malone Dies	Samuel Beckett	no	No
61	Catcher in the Rye	J.D. Salinger	yes	Yes
62	Wise Blood	Flannery O'Connor	no	No
63	Charlotte's Web	E. B. White	yes	Yes
64	The Lord Of The Rings	J. R. R. Tolkien	yes	Yes
65	Lucky Jim	Kingsley Amis	no	No
66	Lord of the Flies	William Golding	yes	Yes
67	The Quiet American	Graham Greene	no	Yes
68	On the Road	Jack Kerouac	yes	Yes
69	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	no	Yes
70	The Tin Drum	Gunter Grass	no	Yes
71	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	no	No
72	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie	Muriel Spark	no	No
73	To Kill A Mockingbird	Harper Lee	yes	Yes
74	Catch-22	Joseph Heller	no	Yes
75	Herzog	Saul Bellow	no	No
76	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	yes	Yes
77	Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont	Elizabeth Taylor	no	No
78	Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy	John Le Carre	no	No
79	Song of Solomon	Toni Morrison	no	No
80	The Bottle Factory Outing	Beryl Bainbridge	no	No
81	The Executioner's Song	Norman Mailer	no	No
82	If on a Winter's Night a Traveller	Italo Calvino	no	Yes
83	A Bend in the River	V. S. Naipaul	no	No
84	Waiting for the Barbarians	J.M. Coetzee	no	No
85	Housekeeping	Marilynne Robinson	no	No
86	Lanark	Alasdair Gray	no	No
87	The New York Trilogy	Paul Auster	no	No
88	The BFG	Roald Dahl	?	Yes
89	The Periodic Table	Primo Levi	no	No
90	Money	Martin Amis	no	No
91	An Artist of the Floating World	Kazuo Ishiguro	no	Yes
92	Oscar And Lucinda	Peter Carey	yes	Yes
93	The Book of Laughter and Forgetting	Milan Kundera	no	No
94	Haroun and the Sea af Stories	Salman Rushdie	no	No
95	La Confidential	James Ellroy	no	Yes
96	Wise Children	Angela Carter	no	Yes
97	Atonement	Ian McEwan	no	Yes
98	Northern Lights	Philip Pullman	yes	Yes
99	American Pastoral	Philip Roth	no	No
100	Austerlitz	W. G. Sebald	no	No

Days Left:    357

Books Left:  100