What face from outside Ireland will sum up 1997 in your mental photograph album? Earl Spencer delivering his stinging oration at the funeral of Princess Diana Louise Woodward sitting pale and tense during her US trial for the murder of a baby for whom she was caring? Chris Patten barely bothering to hold back the tears as he ended his governorship of Hong Kong? The arresting features of Laurent Kabila, the man who finally won the vast pariah nation of Zaire back from the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, shortly before the latter's exile and death? Or perhaps the woolly features of the manmade sheep?
With television and CNN, and the brilliance of newspaper photographers, much of our understanding of foreign affairs is now formed by images. The blanket coverage that television can give to an event such as the death of the Princess of Wales involves us all in a way that would have been unthinkable for our parents.
Even some of us in the news business were surprised at the interest Irish people maintained in the trial of Louise Woodward for the murder of baby Matthew Eappen. There was the precedent of O J Simpson, little known here before the violent death of his estranged wife and his subsequent trial. Perhaps people have become addicted to big-occasion "Court TV" in the way they used to stay in to watch Perry Mason. In the Woodward case there was also the powerful emotional and social draw of childcare in an age of two working parents.
Another sensational news event of the year which seemed to stem from a child care and custody issue was the apparent suicide of rock musician Michael Hutchence in a hotel room in his native Australia. Although nobody knows for sure, the evidence suggested that Hutchence was depressed because his lover, British broadcaster Paula Yates, and her four daughters, one his, could not join him for a lengthy stay in Australia because Yates's ex-husband, Bob Geldof , would not give his permission. Yates's appearance at Hutchence's funeral, obviously distraught but in a ete decollete dress that only enhanced her wild woman image, has to be one of the enduring images of late 1997.
Death, as ever, made big news. The great American actors Jimmy Stewart Robert Mitchum passed away in 1997, as did the intellectual giant Isaiah Berlin and the violinist Stephane Grappelli
But few celebrity demises could be more dramatic than the cold-blooded shooting of fashion designer Gianni Versace near his Florida home in July. The subsequent hunt for his killer, and lurid stories about the possibility that the same man, Andrew Cunanan , was a gay serial killer, proved that truth can be stranger, and messier, than fiction. But who could have imagined, looking at pictures of a black-clad Princess Diana comforting Elton John at Versace's funeral service, that within weeks she too would die violently and that John would be creating an anthem to her.
A less serious case of fashion victimhood was the fiancee of the British Conservative Party's new leader, William Hague Ms Ffion Jenkins, clearly a formidable figure in her own right, was paraded in a £2,000 black lace designer dress - which in the opinion of this page did not suit her at all - at the Tory conference. Was somebody hoping that sex still sells?
Sure it does, but the makers of the doll have decided, perhaps under the influence of the waif-model look embodied by slender beauties such as Kate Moss, that Barbie is too much of a good thing. In November Mattel inc announced that Barbie was going on a mammarial reduction course.
One would not wish to bracket an American doll with the noble ladies of the English realm, but a mention of global fashion highlights for the year ending cannot exclude Queen Elizabeth, on her 50th anniversary of independence tour of Indian and Pakistan. Those socks she was impelled to wear when visiting sacred sites!
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela displayed her usual taste for striking and elaborate outfits as she sat through nine days of testimony about alleged acts of violence she had perpetrated against her opponents, or those suspected of insubordination in her version of the struggle against apartheid. This was at a special hearing of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Johannesburg at the end of November.
Earlier in the year the trial and conviction of two British nurses working in Saudi Arabia was another absorbing running saga. Lucille McLauchlan Deborah Parry were accused of the murder of fellow nurse Yvonne Gilford (55), an Australian. Ms Gilford was found bludgeoned and stabbed to death in her room at a hospital complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in December 1996. There was much anxiety that the brutal solution of beheading, the penalty under Saudi law, would be enforced. Sympathy for the two women increased when it was revealed that the dead woman's brother, Australian taxi driver Frank Gilford, was seeking, as was his right under Saudi law, a payment of blood money.
Money was the obsession of millions around the world when the Asian economies started to collapse, starting with Thailand, which needed an IMF bailout, followed by Indonesia and then, worst of all, the huge Asian tiger, South Korea. The combative prime minister of Malaysia, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, for months repeated the mantra that international speculators such as the Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist George Soros, were to blame because of their ruthless attitude to the effect on the ordinary worker of their currency and stock roulette. Dr Mahathir has quietened somewhat in recent months, as the scale of the Asian collapse put it beyond the ability of one or even several powerful investors to bring about.
Another collapse was rumoured in the fortunes of the ubiquitous Spice Girls , the instigators of what Nelson Mandela claimed to have been the "happiest day of my life" when they called to see him during a South African tour. After two of the girls, and , reportedly forgot their differences to oust their manager, Simon Fuller, in the autumn, the vultures were circling with claims that girl power was on the wane.
We can only keep our fingers crossed.