TWO things were sure on Sunday. One was that Diana, Princess of Wales was dead, although that seemed so incredible it had to be repeated and repeated in the day's media coverage of the tragedy.

The journalists' shock and grieving respect were palpable. And yet just as palpable was a desire to sum up Diana's life, to demand not just reactions but instant judgments from people who could not conceivably have the knowledge they were assumed to be able to draw upon.

We might well ponder the extent to which relentless poring over everything to do with Diana was a compulsive desire to "possess" her when she had been removed from our existence.

Certainly, Diana left us a warning about the destructive effects of a pruriently ogling and addictive public gaze. She felt 'raped' by sections of the press, one friend said. Her brother Lord Spencer's charge was likewise stark. He accused media professionals of having blood on their hands.

Yet these serious allegations were immediately pressed into the work of keeping coverage going, when there was nothing more that could usefully be said.

The coverage just could not stop. A respectful interval in transmissions would have driven home Diana's point about the need for privacy. There was a time when broadcasts were thus suspended; but that is now impossible. That is the second sure thing on Sunday.

In death as in life, Diana was relentlessly pursued.

She deliberately sought publication and broadcasting of her private affairs, but in doing so she tacitly admitted how far she had become the 'creation' of public discourse; and that discourse was as ready to subject her to acrimony as to adulation, a fact we may choose to overlook, at least for a while. God alone knows the ultimate value of Diana as a life and not just as the succession of images in which we framed her.

May He have mercy on her. May he also have mercy on us, especially if in our hunger to make her an idol, we gazed her to death.

JEFFREY MOXHAM, Kingfisher Close, Blackburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.