ONE morning early last week I was doing something and, out of the corner of my eye, I could see Sky News, though I couldn't hear the sound. I was trying not to look, because the Lisburn bombing was the story of the day and I was furious and bitter at all that beginning again.
I was delighted when instead of the bombing the first item on the news, the video of what appeared to be Princess Diana in her cycling shorts came on, horse playing around with a man too limber to be her former husband.
This did not make the bombs and the problem of Northern Ireland go away but at least it said that there are other things in the world, and that not every big news story is about power struggles and death, and that there are human beings whose stories interest other human beings. I'm interested.
Diana and Sarah Ferguson live a soap opera and I value the drive towards health and passion and love implicit in the way they try to run their lives. They're an antidote to all the deathliness around, not least last Tuesday morning.
But then the television showed Diana setting off that morning for her day's work - a slight figure, all but engulfed by the photographers who hound her for a living.
Will she and Fergie pay for what they have achieved by being driven mad by lack of privacy? Because they have achieved as much as any two 20th century women. They have undermined one of the most massive redoubts of the old world - the idea of royalty and of the deference due to royal figures.
It could not have been foreseen that two young women brought up to be trivial in a genteel way would accomplish such a thing. But it is no longer possible to take seriously the notion of curtseying to a Windsor or walking out backwards from the presence of a Windsor or waiting to be spoken to first by a Windsor.
Rather, it is possible to do these things and people will go on doing them. While life is as generally unsatisfying as it is for most people, there will be monarchies as there will be priesthoods.
BUT majesty is just a theme park exhibit now. His subjects are as likely to snigger at a British king as to believe that his touch might cure the quinsy. Shakespearian resonances have given way to chatter of the tabloid papers, who cheerfully reduce all human phenomena to the same few headlines.
And this came about because two young women, who lived at a time and in a culture when they could do something about it, would not put up with unsatisfactory marriages.
It is only a century or so since divorce left a woman with nothing she lost her children and she lost every last bit of social standing. Personal unhappiness as a sufficient reason for divorce is even more recent. (The older generation probably still believe that it isn't an adequate reason.)
As I understand it - information in this area arrives a long time after speculation - Diana discovered that she did not come first with her husband and that he and hiss family had coldly used her as marriage fodder.
Fergie discovered that she had a husband who more or less never came home. They must have felt entitled to better. Some men and many women worked for years to establish that notion of entitlement. If your daughter was similarly disrespected in her marriage, would you say "put up with it", or would you want better for her?
These two women, admittedly helped by the arrogance of their class, but bravely all the same, took on the might - not so much of the royal establishment as of the patriarchal establishment. They held on to their children and secured appropriate maintenance, and they set off to chase the contemporary dream of sharing loving parenting with the former spouse, while looking for a perfect new love. So far, so good.
They had been exemplary, self respecting modern women and because not one but two of them decamped, they left the Windsor dynasty, rather than themselves, looking awkward. They more or less spoke for all the young people who work out at the gym and meet their pals in restaurants and romp with their kids and think Sting is wonderful when they indicated that the culture of the British royal family is staid and boring rural, really - while they themselves are urban and smart and a key word - warm.
But the culture to which our heroines give their allegiance turns out to be very, very silly. The princess and the duchess themselves aren't silly. Diana handled the Panorama interview with chilly competence and she presents herself impeccably in all situations. Sarah Ferguson has made a robust attempt to earn money and she is showing an admirable joie de vivre in the face of incessant campaigns of insult.
But their private lives - their deepest values - seem to be about nothing else but romance. They take up with men who don't have any of their virtues - who don't have any virtues at all, except that you could fancy them. The reason I thought the video was genuine was because the "Di" and the "James Hewitt" in it were doing such infantile things - throwing cushions, playing piggy back and so on.
IT MUST be hard enough to pass the time with Major Hewitt. These men betray the women. Then the women find more such men and this will go on until they are toothless old crones. They wouldn't let the British establishment ruin them. But they will ruin themselves, from within, if they go on behaving as if they have been brainwashed forever by the love industry.
It's not that I expect them to go to night school or train for the missions, and I do see that their choice is confined by the standards of the cafe society which is where they relax. I see, too, that they are second generation romantics their mothers took off too, leaving them with their fathers. But I fear for them.
If they do, however, keep getting embroiled with Hewitt type men, then that's their choice. When freedom is won it includes the freedom to misuse freedom. You often hear a tone of outrage in the voices of ex colonials, for instance, about Africa and "the mess" the Africans are making of independence, implying that if they don't sharpen up and behave like Europeans, independence will be taken back off them and serve them damn well right.
But new countries have to evolve, do they not? Are African conflicts any different in kind from the Vendee or the Thirty Years War or the Spain of the Inquisition, not to mention the first and second World Wars? Similarly, the young people now putting their faith in individualism and romance and youthfulness itself as if it lasts for ever will have to find out for themselves whether these things suffice.
The answer is quite as important for the human race as anything the IRA bombs are saying.