Diana: you're still knocking 'em dead!

Now more than a year after her tragic death, Princess Diana, Queen of Hearts, would still turn heads if she appeared at a gala film premiere or one of her beloved charity functions in any of her favourite frocks.
That's the unanimous finding of people who should know after The Bug undertook a special and moving anniversary tribute to this century's most beautiful and community-minded woman.
Your No, 1 family internet entertainment paper sought answers to the two questions that have been on everyone's lips since that tragic accident in the Paris road tunnel which claimed the life of a kind and gentle princess who won over our hearts in life and forever entrenched herself in the minds of newspaper and magazine editors in death.
Namely, what does she look like now? And more importantly, would she still knock 'em dead in those stunning, provocatively simple yet charmingly expensive dresses she made her own?
The Bug approached leading pathologists and entomologists to gain as accurate a picture of how our beloved Diana would appear now after a year of being buried on her picturesque island home at Dianaworld, eternally free at last from the horrid world that haunted her in life.
We talked to Professor Hordern Pavilion of the Royal British Institute for Forensic Pathology in London and Doctor Joan Hiskins, head of the British Museum's Entomology Department in Leeds to gauge what physical changes have taken place to Diana over the last 12 months.
Then, with advanced computer imagining techniques as used by Scotland Yard's to reconstruct the faces of unidentified long-ago murder victims, The Bug was able to place the up-to-date head of our lovely Diana on some of the eye-catching, fashion-setting dresses with which this simple, beautiful woman strode alone atop the world's stage.
And the result: a glimpse of this icon of the 20th Century's seemingly immortality as fashion experts, society queens and social commentators all agreed that Diana would still be the centre of attention wherever she went even a year after her tragic and senseless death.
"Good gracious God!" was Melbourne socialite and charity doyen Lady Farthington-Forbes-Jones's understandable reaction when we showed her the series of glossy colour photos of the new Diana over a flat white and a butternut pumpkin and leek focaccia at her favourite deli in busy suburban Armadale.
Mrs Farthington-Forbes-Jones and her busy colleagues stopped drinking champagne while working on their current charity, SETT (Save the Endangered Toorak Tractor) , to agreed wholeheartedly with The Bug's suggestion that Princess Diana would still dazzle the crowd if she turn up at any one of the countless haute society charity functions held across Melbourne weekly.
Mrs Farthington-Forbes-Jones and her friends all agreed that with a little bit of imagination, those coyish piercingly blue eyes that beguiled anyone who came within cooee of the Princess in life could almost still be imagined peeking upwards from a slightly tilted and lowered head in place of the cold eye sockets that now stared lifelessly from Diana's ravaged skull.
As if realising what a wonderful charity fundraiser the world had lost a year ago, Mrs Farthington-Forbes-Jones and her colleagues were too overcome with emotion to continue the interview and asked us to leave quietly by the back door.
We then travelled to Sydney to gauge the reaction of the Olympic City's ' social elite at the sumptuous Catalina's restaurant on the harbour foreshore in the prestigious eastern suburbs.
Lady Sonya McMahon, who was enjoying a long lunch there at the time, told us Sydney's social elite had already left the restaurant and should be just about back to her Potts Point home by now if we wanted to talk to her. Sadly, we were unable to make contact.
We then travelled to Brisbane and showed our photos to that city's leading celebrities, Jan Power and Vilma Ward, who promptly ate them with a tangy green salad accompaniment, washed down with a rather cheeky and not all that expensive Australian Rhine riesling.
And later that day, Australian fashion guru Daniel Lightfoot looked over our spare copies of the dead Diana prints and gave the Queen of Hearts the ultimate compliment.
"Most of my models wouldn't be seen dead in any of these outfits," he declared.
So how did The Bug come so uncanningly close to capturing the essence of the Princess Diana a year after her death.
When we set up our meetings in London and Leeds with Sir Hordern and Doctor Hiskins, we were already armed with the results of months of painstakingly monotonous research.
We had British Meteorology Department data on the ground and air temperatures on Diana's island home for each and every day since her internment in early September last year and figures for all insect types and prevalence in the surrounding countryside.
Even before studying our own data, Sir Hordern was able to give us a run-down of what changes Diana would have undergone.
"Her brain and her internal organs would have gone to jelly just about immediately and her skin would have changed colour perceptively," Sir Hordern said.
"And that was just during the car crash!
"Since her burial, Diana's skin would have shrunk and turned black and major decay would have begun almost immediately during what remained of the last northern summer. On the plus side, those beautiful eye lashes and exquisite fingernails would have kept growing for a few months before maggots finally ate them.
"A lot of people may not be aware of this but royalty will rot too," Sir Hordern said, his voice lowered. "Eventually.
"Not as quickly as common untitled folk like you, mind, but rot they do, although naturally enough they wouldn't smell anywhere near as bad because of the better standard of food they eat during their lives."
The United Kingdom's leading entomologist agreed that while Princess Diana would have fared reasonably well during the winter months immediately following her burial, an unusually warm northern spring this year would have accelerated the inevitable decay.
"One of the problems is Diana's resting place. Her brother, Earl Spencer, probably thought it was a good a place as any, but Dianaworld is surrounded by trees and is exceptionally rich in macro and micro fauna, including, I'm afraid, the European Birch Borer (Chompthrouda looneii) which would have made short work of Diana's coffin, no matter how expensive it was.
"The end result, I'm afraid, is that poor old Diana would have been given a right royal working over by now by a myriad of insect grub species and not just your usual fly species maggots."