So how do you plan to mark the anniversary of the death of the Princess of Wales on August 31st? With candles in the Irish summer wind? With a dip through one or more of the books on the subject, which have, believe me, only just started to appear? Treat yourself to an in memoriam colonic irrigation or a visit to a psychic?
This is not meant to be disrespectful, or gross. It is nothing, surely, to compete with the margarine with "Thanks" emblazoned across the lid in what we are led to believe is very-like-her writing - the first item sanctioned officially by the Diana Princess of Wales Fund.
Diana's death might have been horrifying. But the tackiness that has followed in her wake is pretty bad, too. And it's such a long way from being over - if it will ever be over.
But as we gird our loins for the inevitable maudlinomania that will accompany the first anniversary of the Pont de l'Alma crash, another exposition of British emotion is taking the limelight, and again the source is France.
Football hooligans from Liverpool, Leicester and Nuneaton have been demonstrating the downside of the Diana phenomenon, unbridled release of emotion. It raises the question, to paraphrase Prof Henry Higgins, of "why can't the English teach their children how to feel?" As with Eliza Dolittle at Ascot in the film of My Fair Lady, when the buttoned-up repression of emotion gives way, it gives way with a roar as the tidal wave sweeps - as Eliza screams "move your bleeding arse", as people spend millions on flowers to cover Kensington Gardens, and as bare-chested bovver boys split heads on a beach in Marseille.
"Most people would just stand there and not have a problem with it. It's just us. We go for it every time. It's sad," football fan Mark Jenson (23) from Surrey said on Sunday, as his countrymen were being hauled off by the gendarmes. But why is it "just us"? The stiff upper lip is such a cliche that it hardly bears serious scrutiny as the cause of a nation's unsatisfactory emotional life. Yet perhaps it is. The English heroes are men such as Churchill, shoved off to boarding school at an early age, writing heart-rending letters begging Mama to come to the school play (she didn't), then, with mastery established over such weaknesses, going on to win the second World War. . .
Perhaps what is needed is a good dose of the mores of the once-despised continental Johnny Foreigner, laughing and crying openly, touching people, not regarding an expression of feeling as "rather bad form". Sometimes this repression can become absurd, as in the incident several summers ago when a couple had sex in a crowded train carriage on a way back from what used to be called "a works outing". Nobody complained - until one of the participants lit a post-coital cigarette. Then one of the spectator-passengers asked them to desist, pointing out the "No Smoking" sign.
Two of the latest books about Diana have the advantage of taking in the depth and breadth of the outburst of mourning which followed her death. Aspects of the late Princess of Wales could be detected in the authors of each - upper-crusty feminist Beatrix Campbell, and pouty populist Julie Burchill. Burchill, who made her name as a teenage iconoclast and has had to live up to that for decades, seems to have been in love with the princess, and love can indeed be blind. Burchill shares with us, for example, her sense that Princess Diana was a Jew manque - "profoundly maternal, disliking horse, strongnosed". (Is it true that Jewish people dislike horses?).
Campbell's book is far superior, and perhaps it is unfair even to bracket hers with the Burchill book, which is all pictures and instant cliches.
But in any case it has all been said before, so often, in so many places, that it stretches the ingenuity of the most gifted hack to take it beyond the "why, oh why" stage beloved of both Fleet Street women columnists and their satirists.
Diana's death was very, very sad. It was sad because life cut short always seems unfair, and sad. But also it was very much so because she had two sons who still have demanding lives lived often in the public eye, and these lads have been deprived at an early stage of those lives of the loving caring mother who would have understood so much of their situations.
But here is another situation, also very sad. "Margaret" is an administrative worker in a London office. Fiftyish, she is neat, attractive, perfectly-groomed, but somewhat sour in her aspect. Commenting on this to a mutual acquaintance one day, I was told the reason: her son, innocently walking to a train station, had been beaten to a pulp by a gang of excited football louts some years before. He was now what has been called "a vegetable".
It all came back, both the tragedy of that boy and the emotional wrenching of Diana's death, looking at the television pictures of the English fans' antics in Marseille this week. And this aspect of emotional release was something the glamorous Tony Blair could not channel.
He waved the chequered flag for the national release of grief when Diana died, with his appearance on the morning of her death to say "She was truly the People's Princess" (Julie Burchill's people, by the way, claim she was the true coiner of the phrase). Blair faltered slightly with his over-the-top pauses in the reading at Diana's funeral service in Westminster Abbey, but by then it was all over (unlike football violence). English people had already shown the state they were in when they made the ultimate sacrifice to sign the Book of Condolences at St James Palace: they were missing their last trains home.
When it came to the English lads exercising their presumed right to beat up foreigners in Marseille, Blair, away at Cardiff for the EU summit, was as effective as, well, a candle in the wind. It's OK to martial a squadron of teddy-bears; quite another to stop a rain of broken bottles.
Mouthing the Blair equivalent of "this really is appalling", the current British prime minister looked more like a hapless John Major than we have yet seen him. And the lame comments about those chaps being a disgrace didn't do much to compensate the citoyens of Marseille.
Professor Anthony Clare, who has read and reviewed both the latest Diana books, is not convinced about the "other side of the coin" theory in relation to football violence. What he thinks the hooliganism indicates is the "terrible insecurity" of the English nation at this time in its history: "England is in a very defensive mood." He says the English are often seen as "emotionally constipated", and this contributed to the extraordinary reaction after the princess's death.
"It will run for a while," he says of the Diana-dissection industry. "Perhaps the emotional response was a bit whipped up, but there was something to whip up. She was such a fragmented figure, more people could make a connection with her - young women on the margin, people who liked to identify with glamorous figures. There was something for everyone."
They'll be writing books about the unhappy princess in 2098. Whatever its width and breadth, emotion stands to win out over reason in the public mind.