London. Saturday, September 6th, 1997. Nothing, but nothing, could have prepared us. It was in truth a day like no other. The endless search for comparisons - with Sir Winston Churchill's funeral, with VE Day in 1945 - in the end proved utterly meaningless. Neither capital nor nation had ever seen the like.
They came to bury Diana, Princess of Wales. They had been promised "a unique funeral for a unique person". But with a torrent of emotion and affection - which at times seemed startlingly un-British - the people delivered for themselves a coronation.
In death, Diana achieved what she had aspired to in life. At day's end, on an island surrounded by an ornamental lake on the Spencer family's ancestral estate, they buried "the queen of people's hearts".
Tens of thousands had camped out overnight along the processional route to be sure of their place, simply to be there at the end. A late summer sun bathed them even as they shrugged off the early morning chill - the sparkling dew a mirror of the imminent tears of a people wanting to mourn. They awoke, like tens of millions of their countrymen and women, knowing that a truly cathartic experience lay before them.
And as the gun carriage bearing Diana's coffin wound its way slowly toward Westminster Abbey - the silence broken by the crunch on gravel, the muted toll of the tenor bell - the immediate, powerful sense was that that great emotional release would prove the more deserved because of its inclusive and unselfish character.
On Friday night, after days of mounting anger and criticism, Queen Elizabeth had moved decisively to heal the breach between her and her people. The nonsenses of protocol which had infuriated her subjects were banished at a stroke. From their Balmoral seclusion the royals came back to share the public grief at the death of "the people's princess". And the people were ready with their response.
They comforted their queen. They reached out to Prince William and Prince Harry. And, for all their confused and conflicting emotions, there was evidence of kindness and compassion, too, for a tortured Prince of Wales.
Who would have stood in his shoes this long, dreadful week? Poor of soul, surely, were those who could not imagine his agony and torment as he made the lonely journey to Paris to bring Diana home - in full view of a watching world which thought it knew what had happened between them, and, for the most part, now certainly held him to blame. Who could fully grieve for those poor boys without understanding their need that something of the nation's sympathy be spared for the father they patently love, and on whom they will so depend in the difficult days and years ahead?
Family death is no time for discord. Grief on this scale surely must be all-embracing. And before us on Saturday we saw that healing process at work as princes walked with relative paupers in an unfolding spectacle which really did combine Diana's majesty and modernity.
There were moving sights. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, travelled by car to the abbey, knowing this was the one royal funeral for which the BBC had not staged a full dress-rehearsal. We could only guess her feelings, knowing of her dismay at the failure of the marriage of the beautiful princess to her favourite grandson.
We could not begin to know the emotions of Mr Mohamed al-Fayed as he and his wife entered the abbey just five days after they had buried the son - Dodi - who, at the last, brought joy to Diana's life. But we could be glad that a system which at times conspires to appear heartless and unfeeling understood he must be there.
And we could draw small pleasures from other signs that the "guidance" of crusty courtiers might not now be so mighty. At Westminster Abbey, the Prime Minister, like his predecessors, proved able to find his own seat without a phalanx of uniformed minders - ambling in the aisles alongside pop stars and people from all walks of ordinary life. For the first time in memory there was no outward evidence of that allocation by rank which required the commoners to be in their place before the arrival of the supposed "great and good".
Meanwhile, the chief mourners behind the cortege were followed by a procession of people representing all the princess's favourite charities - from the Ballet to the Red Cross, the Leprosy Mission to the Sports Association for the Disabled.
As they neared Buckingham Palace we saw still more evidence of the royal family's healing process - with the people and within its own ranks. The Duchess of York, quite properly, was there alongside her estranged husband and their children to mourn the woman to whom she, at least, had been a friend. Yet the truly amazing sight was of the royal family walking through the palace grounds, like mere mortals, to stand with their people and pay their respects as the cortege drew past.
By public command, much precedent had been unceremoniously dumped in the preceding 48 hours. But this act, above all others perhaps, conveyed the powerful message that the people had been heard and heeded. We were not to know there was more, much more, to come, that "the people's" voice would find new expression, and that before the princess's body had departed the abbey, the House of Windsor would have to endure a public rebuke without precedent in its long reign.
Earl Spencer cut a heroic figure as he paid his deeply moving tribute to the sister who was "the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty".
Crucially - above all for the sake of princes William and Harry - the Earl sought to check the deification process already at an advanced stage. He showed courage in recalling the unhappiness of their shared childhood. Diana, he reminded us, was always insecure at heart - "childlike" almost in her desire to do good as a means of release "from deep feelings of unworthiness of which her eating disorders were merely a symptom". She was complex as well as beautiful, extraordinary and irreplaceable. And he spoke an important truth when he said she did not need canonisation: "You stand tall enough as a human being of unique qualities not to need to be seen as a saint. Indeed, to sanctify your memory would be to miss out on the very core of your being . . . "
Earl Spencer issued an important challenge, too, to the British public as he blasted the paparazzi and those in the media who had reduced "a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting" to "the most hunted person of the modern age". Even as they endorsed his sentiments, one wondered if the watching public could yet grapple with the implications of his pledge to protect Diana's beloved boys. "We will not allow them to suffer the anguish that used regularly to drive you to tearful despair," he promised his departed sister.
Prince Charles yesterday called for his sons to be given time and space as they contemplated their future lives without their mother. The longer term challenge to achieve that, with its possible implications for limited privacy provision and for press freedom, may well have featured during Mr Tony Blair's discussions with Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral.
However, discussions between the monarch and her Prime Minister are likely to be dominated for some time to come by the issues raised by Earl Spencer's sensational public warning over the future care and upbringing of Prince William and Prince Harry.
Memories of Diana's famed Panorama interview were revived as Earl Spencer - with a style still more direct, and every bit as lethal - rebuked the Windsors for stripping Diana of her HRH title following her divorce a year earlier. We imagined a nation on the edge of its seats as he told the assembled mourners, led by Queen Elizabeth, that Diana was "someone with a natural nobility who was classless, and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic".
We watched disbelieving - as we had at Diana's Panorama performance - when Earl Spencer told of her "most bizarre life imaginable" within the royal firmament, while affirming that, somehow, "she remained intact, true to herself".
And we gasped as he vowed that Diana's "blood family" would do all it could to steer the young princes in Diana's imaginative and loving way "so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned".
What an indictment of the royal firm. What confirmation of the enmity between the Spencer family and the House of Windsor, into which their golden child had married and from which she fought to escape. What baring of the soul on a day of personal and collective grief. And, when he had finished, what resonance Earl Spencer's words found among the massed crowds hearing the broadcast relayed on the streets and in the royal parks.
First as a whisper, then a roar of thunder, the public applause came upon the congregation in the abbey, finally embracing the mourners there in an astonishing outburst doubtless ringing still in Queen Elizabeth's ears as she returned later to her fastness at Balmoral.
The immediate, oft-repeated reaction on the ground was that the Earl had said what needed to be said; what people felt but feared to speak at such a time. The practical implications of his words will take time to assess and carry through.
We do not know what instructions or requests the princess may have left concerning the upbringing of her children in the event of her death. The princes spend much of their time at boarding school. There are obvious limits to what Earl Spencer, who lives in South Africa, can either do or provide. And we should bear in mind that this is not just some spat between two aristocratic families.
Constitutionally, all matters concerning the future king are first and foremost the responsibility of Queen Elizabeth. Moreover, the focus on potential conflicts should not blind us to Earl Spencer's motive and intention. The Spencer family, he said, "fully respect the heritage into which [the boys] have been born, and will always respect and encourage them in their royal role . . . " That, too, is no less than their mother would have expected.
Against that, Earl Spencer has voiced a general concern that last week's belated concessions to the popular mood should prove more than a temporary expedient. On Friday, the queen said she, for one, believed there were lessons to be learned from Diana's death and the extraordinary reaction to it. She was, she told her subjects, as determined as they to cherish Diana's memory. Earl Spencer's words will have fuelled the demand for proof of that in future actions.
For at the very least he has raised the spectre that - should the royal family attempt to bury the humane dimensions of Diana's legacy - he could take recourse to the court of public opinion.
A tantalising prospect for the media, to be sure. But one from which both families will want to recoil. Upon reflection, people may see that further attacks on Prince Charles's position can only subvert their declared resolve to protect his two sons. Likewise, the understanding will surely be that public battles have already cost them dear.
Moreover, we would almost certainly be wrong to suppose that either Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles will want to shy away from this cathartic experience - or that Mr Blair would let them. In a way and to a degree that we can hardly imagine, the queen and her son are driven above all by sense of duty. They will be the first to comprehend that the death of Diana, Princess of Wales - and that duty to the succession - has tied the House of Windsor ever more firmly to the House of Spencer.