I think the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, might have changed my life.

I didn’t discover she had died until about 2pm on the afternoon of Sunday 31 August 1997 – hours after the news had broken. This is because that’s when I got up. I was 22 years old, and the night before had been pretty big. I staggered downstairs and turned on the TV to see the Archbishop of Canterbury talking about Diana in the past tense. Alone in my London house share, I remained in front of the screen for the next five hours. During this time, I decided I’d got the most famous woman in the world quite wrong – and a certain amount else besides.

I had judged Diana, unthinkingly. Naff hairstyle. Shoulder pads. Media-courting. Manipulative. Middle-class kids of my generation, who had come of age in the 1990s, had never really bought into the popular adulation of Diana to begin with. Imbued subconsciously with admiration of the more austere iteration of the monarchy familiar to my parents and embodied by the Queen, I had found Diana’s sheer level of interaction with the public, all that touching and holding hands, well, sort of vulgar.

I had judged her “fans” too, such as my best friend when I was 12, who kept a scrapbook of her. How uncool, when there was River Phoenix to idolise.

But, as I watched TV that afternoon, I realised my snobberies were irrelevant. This was a real tragedy. You couldn’t deny the “top line” of the story, to coin a media phrase. Here was a woman of rare beauty, once the bride in the wedding of the century, whose fame had become such a commodity that she had been chased to her death for it.

Joan Baez had written a prescient line about Diana back in 1981, the year of her marriage to Charles: “She looks from the balcony knowing the last fantasy of the century is probably a lie.” How much sadder her story was now, by its end, a condemnation of the superficial preoccupations of our age. “My heart goes out to you, Princess, lovely Lady Di,” as Baez sang in Lady Di And I.

I decided I must see the flowers that were being left at Kensington Palace. I only lived a short bus ride away. But my night before had been so very large I didn’t have the mettle for it. How absurd not to bear immediate witness to the event of the decade because I had a hangover. I was partying every weekend at that point, my Sundays a graveyard of apathy and feeling really quite ill. I stopped doing that after Diana died. Not completely, not all at once. But I calmed down.

I went to the flowers the next morning, instead: there was still simply a line of them, pinned to the gates in the park. These were the flowers from people who knew her, or who at least had met her.