“I stood there many days in a row, inhaling the perfume of flowers and absorbing the grief of dumbstruck strangers, tears pouring down their faces.
“I had not seen anything like it and didn’t understand it fully back then.
“I was sent to cover it and file stories back to my news desk, a “get involved but not overwhelmed’’ type of thing.
“All around me were cards, letters, teddy bears, candles, condolence books and folk clinging to each other as they wept for someone they had never met but emphatically believed they knew intimately, at the very least because of the undeniably public nature of her death.
“It was an unprecedented oasis in the middle of a taxing and frantic city, one of the world’s busiest.”
Read more: DailyTelegraph
