Coronavirus diary, Monday 27 April

Death has always made news. Accidents, disasters, wars have all been best sellers for newspapers, made dramatic viewing for television. Local papers still devote columns reporting individual deaths. Or they did in my day. Now, death reporting has taken on a new dimension, led by television. And I find it distressing, shameful. It is unavoidable, every day on the news bulletins - Coronavirus bulletins - a relentless parade of grief, inviting us to join in the great 'cry in'. The latest manifestation is the montage of faces of virus victims, growing week by week to hundreds as the toll mounts. Are all those families willing to allow this? Were they asked? Does it merely add to their sadness and sense of loss? Do the editors and journalists responsible  care? 

I don't think so. For them it makes good television. If one of my loved ones died I would not like to see their face day after day on television's montage of death. In my weekly newspaper days death reporting was an unpleasant but important job. Calling on homes, getting details of the lives of the deceased and writing a few lines or columns departing on the 'news value', public interest. It was straight, factual reporting. I never remember writing 'tributes'. That is what families did in paid obituary notices. How times have changed. Now we have almost daily interviews of grieving, distraught relatives crying 'on camera', enduring interviews. To put it crudely, 'sob stories'.

Flower power: mourning Diana, 1997

The  nation has been caught up in mass grieving which we first saw with the death of Princess Diana when the whole nation was shown shedding tears and laying fields of flowers. I don't want to be part of this public parade. I share the sadness and loss of those bereaved by this brutal virus but prefer to do so privately, more reverently, perhaps.