Does Princess Di’s grave qualify for modern mythical-site status?

A long time ago, in a less moral time, a good friend of mine took a trip to England. Actually, he took a trip to the North Sea, off the coast of England, on behalf of whales. This was at a time when Norway had decided to fly in the face of international ecological agreements and plain old good sense and begin hunting whales again. My friend was there to try and stop them. He was on a boat captained by a man who loved to see his face on the news, armed with squirt guns full of fish guts and paint guns full of paint. Sadly, they proved no match for the Norwegian Navy which, it turns out, was armed with big cannons and bad intentions. The Navy fired its guns. The captain made the news. My friend made it back to England alive.

Once in England, he paid a visit to a series of crop circles just outside of the town of Avebury. A crop circle is a perfect circle made of bent and broken grass laid out in the middle of a field. Supposedly no one knows their origin. Supposedly they were made by landing flying saucers. They are treated in high mystical regard by people who treat such things with high mystical regard. In a field just outside Avebury there are four perfect circles set out in a perfect line of descending order. Large to small or small to large depending on which side you start. Those were trying days – my friend was really very mad at the Norwegians and a little mad at God and, in truth, mostly drunk. So he added a fifth formation to the row of crop circles – a crop square. Some serious mystical ballyhoo. The gauntlet had been thrown.

So, for years, there has been a silent running challenge between us to outdo the square. A perfect opportunity arrived. A rather reputable paper had decided to send a writer to England and do a comparison of two mystical sites of unknown importance: Stonehenge and Princess Diana’s grave. OK, I’ll admit it, it was my idea. It may have lacked the subtle grace of a crop square, but it was guaranteed to reach a larger audience.

STONEHENGE SITS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SALISBURY PLAIN, a two-hour drive from London, a big pile of rocks representing 5,000 years of unanswered questions. Who, what, where, why and how, for starters. The structure consists of three monuments built over a period of 15 centuries, dating back in its entirety to 3050 B.C.

The first construction was a series of holes known as the Aubrey Holes. Rounded pits about 3-feet wide with steep sides and flat bottoms that form a circle roughly 284 feet in diameter. Way back when they held timber posts, but after those disappeared they were used for cremation burials. The holes are surrounded by a circular ditch surrounded by a circular bank and a counterscarp. Like the later constructions, the circles had entrances and exits aligned with the sunrise of the summer solstice. The whole deal looks like someone took a medium-sized automobile, something like a Buick, locked the wheel in one direction and drove in perfect circles for about 10 years.

The second phase lasted from 2900 B.C. to 2600 B.C., a maze of timber shoved into a series of post holes dug, mad-gopher style, among the interior of the previous circles. These days the timber is long gone and the post holes are filled in and nobody really knows too much more, not even about the gopher.

The third phase is the one for the postcards. A smaller inner circle of blue stones, each about 6.5 feet in height, weighing in at about 4 tons and originally quarried from the Preseli Mountains in Wales. Though there aren’t many left, archeologists have found that the original inner circle contained about 60 stones. These are surrounded by the mammoth standing stones, many in excess of 25 tons, known as the Sarsen Stone Circle. These stones were removed from the Marlborough Downs, roughly 20 miles away, and brought by what – boat, cart, bent back – around 2000 B.C. The stones in the outer circle have been shaped, squared on the inside and rounded on the outside by some pretty serious stone masons and then joined together by a complicated mortise-and-tendon system. Which is a long way of saying these things are precise and big: really big; towering, jutting and arranged to represent a complicated six-month calendar where the sun falls on a different stone each month and aligns in special places to mark the summer solstice and the winter solstice. No matter what else you want to believe the whole deal is pretty amazing.

What’s even more amazing are the conditions under which Stonehenge manages to be amazing. The monument is a World Heritage Site, which means that somewhere along the line, a committee got together and decided that humanity as a species is better served with Stonehenge preserved and perfect for all eternity than as some fixture running alongside some lunatic developer’s golf course, which might seem like a serious flight of fancy unless you’ve ever stood in line for the Port-a-Potty bathrooms in the oversized parking lot just north of Stonehenge and had a conversation.

“Pretty impressive huh?”
“What? Them rocks?”
“Yeah, them rocks.”
“Be more impressive if there was a golf course running through here.”
“Interesting idea, where are you from?”
“Texas.”
“Hey didn’t you guys build a K-Mart across the street from the Alamo?”

This World Heritage stuff also means that every tourist with a map and an inkling comes down to see the thing. Forget being alone among the stones. Forget holding your own private ceremony. Give it up. What you get are long lines and Popsicle stands and men in pastels and women with babies and babies crying and everywhere people with these weird phone-like devices pressed to their ears. These devices look like huge walkie-talkies and provide a running commentary of historical information as you wander around a preset path for your date with one of the world’s greatest mysteries. A giant cell-phone convention, pretty damn inspiring.

PRINCESS DIANA'S GRAVE, on the other hand, might have been inspiring, might have run circles around Stonehenge, might have been the best thing since Tonka Trucks, might have been damn near anything, but I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t know because I never made it, but I never made it, not for lack of trying.

The thing about Diana’s grave, the thing that qualifies it for modern mythical-site status, beyond the psychotic world-tragedy status and the nonstop television coverage watched by more than 2 billion people and the blizzard of flowers left at Kensington Palace and the endless refrain of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon and Mother Teresa comparisons is, well, what? Martin Amis, in his eulogy for TIME magazine, wrote: “Madonna sings. Grace Kelly acted. Diana simply breathed.” Whatever that means. Even a writer of Amis’ stature is moved to obfuscation. What makes Diana’s grave so inexplicably mythic is that her death and her life and the amount of world attention she garnered is, if not worthy of World Heritage status, at least deserving of a puzzled expression.

She is buried in the rough center of England, near Northhampton, on the Althorp Estate, where she spent her teenage years. Her ashes rest in an urn, on an island, at the center of a lake. The urn is 4-feet high and made of Portland stone and stands on a 9-foot plinth. Much of the plinth is hidden from view by wild vegetation and a twine of rambling roses. The island is known as The Round Oval. The lake is ornamental. I have no idea what plinth means, but I get the idea. I have slight thoughts as to a round oval, but an ornamental lake?

When the decision was made to open her grave to the public, grief became a commodity. The thinking then was that the grave would be open to the public for about 2 months. So to cull the masses, they decided to charge 15 bucks admission. A hundred-and-fifty-two-thousand people bought tickets. They sold out in minutes. But here’s the thing about London, theater capital of the world: there is a great, great, black market for tickets. Better-than-New York great. There is no such thing as not available.

I was staying at the Park Lane Hilton, which is pretty high up on the list of fancy. I could look into Hyde Park from my window. I could walk to Buckingham Palace (Which I did actually walk to and wait in line and take the tour. Beside a Rembrandt or two the most interesting thing I can tell you – as I learned from interrogating a security guard – is that the oddest crime someone has ever been arrested for at the Palace was one in which a guy parachuted onto the roof in the nude with his genitalia spray-painted green. I love this country.) The concierge desk at this Hilton is black market-ticket Mecca. In the world of Hilton guests, the words “sold out” do not apply. That is, unless you want to visit Diana’s grave.

OK, I couldn't get tickets. I figured take the train, stand at the gate, don’t go in, but at least see the place. Which is when I learned the real truth. For whatever reason, nobody in England really wanted me to visit Northhampton.

“Hey, how do I get to Northhampton?”
“Why would you want to go there?”
“I’m kind of curious about Diana’s grave.”
“Sold out.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard, just thought I’d walk around the town.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Why?”
“Dreadful place, not even a decent pub.”

Which is not just the conversation I had at the concierge desk at the Hilton, it’s the conversation I had with everyone, including the guy who sells newspapers outside the tube stop at Charing Cross Road.

“Bloody awful, not even a decent pub.”

Which is why I went anyway. I read the maps myself, I took a train. It cost about 60 bucks, but what the hell, I knew I was saving the $15 admission charge. I had heard the warnings, I wasn’t about to mess with Northhampton, I found the first taxi out and jumped in. There is a fence surrounding Althorp House and outside the fence a throng of mournful looking people. The fence was big and cold to the touch. It did not come complete with a sign reading “Beware of Royalty,” but I got the idea pretty fast. Most of the mournful people were better dressed than myself and kept informing me of that with their long mournful glances. Screaming “Hey, anyone got an extra ticket?” was not done.

So, instead, I stood in the crowd and had a meaningful glimpse of a long driveway and a couple of big stone buildings that looked a lot like stables.

“Hey are those stables?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t by chance have an extra ticket?”
“Disrespectful bastard.”
Which I took to mean no, but what the hell, they were nice stables. Pretty damn inspiring.

In 5,000 years will some poor sod stumble upon the urn and the lake and the island and think to themselves: who, what, where, why and how? Will the gods be invoked? Will people flock and falter? Will Diana achieve World Heritage status at the end of 5 millennia? Who knows. What I can tell you is that there is a decent pub in Northhampton. The beer is cold and cheaper than it is in London. Somewhere between my second and third pint it came to me, a plan: it was time to get drunk and go looking for some crop circles.