All Stories

The town of Warwick, near where Diana had her barn, started to attract commuters from New York City.  People would build houses there as a weekend place, or commute into the city from there.

Di would go up herself every Friday and return to New York Sunday evening.

This exchange was overheard once in the grocery store in Warwick:

“How is it having a place up here?  Is the commute back to the city difficult?”

“It’s usually fine, hour and a half tops.  But whatever you do, don’t leave at 6pm on a Sunday night. You might get caught behind this ancient slow-moving Subaru. It’s filled with cats and driven by a woman smoking and drinking a glass of wine.”

In the heat of many an argument, be it women’s rights, Middle Eastern politics, sanctions on South Africa, or any other of her pet topics, she would often say with complete sincerity:

“Well if you had read your Gibbon you would know….”

Since almost no one has read all six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, let alone even one, that might just have been the end of the argument.

No doubt Di had read her Gibbon.

My family were camping with Diana at Third Bridge in Moremi Game Park, northern Botswana.

It was dusk and we were preparing dinner but had not yet started a fire.

My mother went outside the perimeter of the camp to pee, but came running back saying “LIONS!!!”.

We all froze in our places, listening, anticipating at any moment that the lions would pounce and eat us all. We could hear them grunting just outside the camp.

We sat for an eternity.

Suddenly Diana, eyes wide, whispered to my father, who was sitting nearby: “HAND ME A KNIFE!!!”.  He rummaged blindly on the camp table and handed it to her cautiously. We sat in heightened expectation, aware that our very lives might be saved by Diana and her weapon.

Time passed and eventually we thought we might be able to dash for the cars.  Eventually we did and made it to safety.

It was only then that Diana looked down at the object in her hand…. it was a spoon.

In 1988 Diana was pulled over for speeding in rural New Jersey while on her way to the Barn.

She felt this was a gross miscarriage of justice and decided to fight it all the way.

She became an expert on police radar, and the particular brand in use that day (MPH Industries K55 X-Band). She studied all the case law involving it.

She studied the Doppler effect and possible sources of electromagnetic interference in police cars.

She went to the site of the incident and examined all the angles of the road and the physics thereof, calculating how it would be possible for a car to be traveling at x number of feet per second at which point in the road.

Strong in her belief that there was no way she could have been speeding at that particular point of the road and that the radar was either faulty or misread, and armed with stacks of documentation proving her points, she strode confidently into the small courtroom.

“Hey Bill,” said the prosecutor to the Judge, “how’s the family?”

“Just great Bob, thanks”

And on that basis the Judge threw the book at Diana without ever examining her evidence.

Neville and I had come to visit Aunt Di in 1996 from our very rural home in Botswana. Slightly nervous about the big city, we ventured out with a full agenda.

I had a cold that got progressively worse, so I eventually gave up and went back to the Loft to rest. Because Di was, well, Di, I was a little embarrassed to be such a wimp as I sheepishly got into the guest bed.

Di peeked her head into the room: “Dahling, would you like a cat?”

Yes, yes, I very much would. So she loaned me Festus, her very best snuggler, and he nursed me back to health.

She let me know that besides his healing abilities, he was an intellectual “triumph.”