IT is strange to think that Princess Diana died five years ago on August 31.

But it is becoming equally hard to believe that she ever lived at all.

Her premature death in her 30s, the way she died in a horrific car crash and the global mourning, helped to deify her almost immediately.

She had come to personify the difference that someone special can make to good causes. How a mere mortal can work a kind of compassionate magic that made others automatically feel better -- even when they were dying of AIDS.

This is not a criticism of her. She was undoubtedly a flawed human being, but she was also heroic in many ways. And she brought out the best in people of all ages, types and creeds, in anti-royalists as well as monarchists.

No. What is hard to accept is that during her life her presence made people focus on the better side of their natures.

Her example encouraged thousands of ordinary people to become better individuals, to acknowledge that it was acceptable to work for charity without making excuses for "good deeds." That "do gooders" was not a term of derision.

But, where is the evidence now of her enormous influence for good? How much of the better people we found in ourselves have remained over the intervening years?

True, there are some memorials to Princess Diana. But there appears to have been more expensive wrangling about her memorial fund than actual projects accomplished in her name.

Her shrine at Althorp reopens once more this summer for the "tourist season" which, when Charles Spencer gets embroiled in yet another public debate on royal shortcomings, is in danger of tarnishing her memory rather than enhancing it.

It is simply becoming harder and hazier to remember the shine and influence of this most glittering of modern day royals. Perhaps it is time to start reminding ourselves what it was about her that was so special that millions of people around the world were directly affected by her. It is time to try to recapture some of the Diana magic.

A serious re-appraisal of her life using film, newspaper clippings and individual testimony would be about right, possibly by some eminent but audience-friendly biographer.

Every now and then, we need reminding about great people and events and how they impinged on ordinary lives. And, whether you like her or loathed her, there is no denying this fact.

Only that way will the real legacy of Princess Diana, the iconic influence, become a force for good once more.