I had watched the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer through a haze of anaesthetic and pain, recovering from minor surgery in a London clinic. Seeing her that day, I felt that we were connected in a very powerful way, and that at some time in the future this connection would be proved. There was nothing logical about this premonition, and later I put it down to my drug-altered state of mind. Truthfully, I had taken no more interest in Diana before the marriage than had the average person enchanted by the heady idea of it all. To this day I still don't understand why I felt such certainty, but some insights defy analysis. Years later, however, when Diana and I knew each other very well, we were to agree that in some past life we might have been cousins, sisters, perhaps even mother and daughter. It seemed to be the only way to explain the depth of the rapport between us. But like most people on that peerless July day in 1981 I merely thought that the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana was a glorious piece of royal theatre.

I wished them both well, shared in something of the world's romantic optimism about them, and returned to dealing with my own life. Sixteen years later, in the early hours of 31 August 1997, I was in bed at home when I sleepily took a call from a friend who gave me the news of the car accident in Paris, after which I turned on the television. Astonishingly, I can't remember who rang, although I do remember my young nephew calling soon afterwards to ask if I needed him to come over. And I recall trying to reach the journalist Richard Kay, a true friend to the Princess, and to me. I have very little recollection of the days after her death. I went into suspended animation, my emotions frozen. Although this might seem to be in chilly contrast to the massive nationwide--indeed, worldwide-- ood of grief for Diana, it was nevertheless an expression of the same terrible sense of shock. Most of the millions who laid owers down or signed condolence books were marking a genuine and deeply felt sadness for the waste of a woman who, although they had never met her, had somehow managed to touch human nerves and chords with her extraordinary magic and inherent goodness.

It was not quite the same for me, however. I'm not saying that Diana's death affected those of us who really knew her in a more important way, but that the grief, being personal, was differently powerful. Now, as I look back on my friendship with her, I see a thousand shimmering glimpses of the complex, caring, sometimes capricious, but always human princess. I feel privileged to have those memories. When someone you really care for dies there is often a frustrating sense of un nished business. There is not a single day when I do not want to complete old, interrupted conversations, or share a funny anecdote with her, or simply give her a hug. I have to remind myself that love is not buried with the cof n any more than friendship is always begun with a formal handshake. Ours had begun, it seems, with my premonition on her wedding day, although neither of us knew of it at the time.

Only a month later, something else was to have a much more immediately profound effect on me. Yet this family crisis was to draw me inexorably and, perhaps inevitably, towards Diana. When, in a hospital in August 1981, I saw a rainbow aura emanating from the motionless body of my nineteen-year-old sister Rachel, who had been severely injured in a road accident days before, I found that I could communicate with her, despite the coma that she would remain in for many months. I began to wonder if I had some.