Princess Diana said she’d buy the flowers herself. In heaven, the flower shops never close, neither do the casinos. You can lose weeks to blackjack or poker, a century or so to the spin of roulette. But heaven lacks jeopardy, with money itself (as both a construct and a physical manifestation) being obsolete. Heaven, on the whole, is a lot like Goop, all mindful crystals and 8 hours’ dreamless sleep, but you don’t need a jade egg (the angels automatically tighten up your pelvic floor at the pearly gates as part of the entry MOT). It’s hard to fully describe nirvana, but think of the opposite of Black Mirror and you’re close. Needless to say, everyone looks like their best selfies and war is over. Leisures are rampant—lots of time is devoted to teenage follies like summer picnics and Wurlitzer fingering—which makes scheduling a candlelit supper all the more difficult, even for the former princess of Wales. Diana was planning one of her infamous and intimate dinners, and flowers we needed for the table. A bunch of England’s Roses, her signature, would set off the royal china she got in the divorce.

In heaven butlers are ten a penny but after the Paul Burrell fiasco Diana liked to do things herself, hankering down in the kitchen ahead of the frivolities. Something about the rough noose of an apron at her neck was, she was surprised to admit, a comfort she preferred to pearls. As a traditionalist, she spent the day curling out prawn rings and triple-basting a ham—she used to preserve her own fruits but this was quietly dialled down after the whole Squril jam thing because people always pictured a bucket of mould when she presented a coulis. While whipping eggs into soft peaks, she double checked her Whatsapp for confirmed guests. Mother Theresa was still a maybe (she had a thing with Jesus and the disciples she was trying to get out of), but Houdini was coming, and despite a firm warning from Diana after an incident last summer where the sawn-off bottom half of a guest had been indefinitely misplaced, was surely planning more of his insufferable party tricks. There was a time when Shakespeare had been a regular fixture at these suppers, but his expectation for every night to end in suicidal star-cross’d tragedy was overbearing and he’d eventually formed a little clique with Hans Christian Anderson and Jack from Titanic who never tired of his drama, each of them quite keen on tragic endings and happy to decipher his iambic pentameter over a mutton stew.

In the years since the crash, despite rampant conspiracy theories and the drama over her foot spa in Hyde Park, Diana had settled into heaven quite nicely, even though she found her terrestrial role was somewhat diminished. There were no hospitals, you see, so there were no sick kids that needed comforting hugs in front of the cameras (the photo opportunity of that was moot, as few paparazzi made it past Saint Peter). There were still a few lepers in heaven but that was a bun fight with Jesus that wasn’t worth her time. There weren’t many openings to attend, and certainly no King-in-waiting husband to shadow. In the aftermath of the floral tarmac laid by the public outside Buckingham Palace for her funeral, Diana had found herself as somewhat of a loose end.

Even her iconic style was wavering. Former princesses usually stick to eveningwear, but revenge dresses lost their edge around the time of the millennium bug, and Diana found herself favouring luxury jersey and shearling workwear to tiaras. She was, frankly, a slave to the gentle elasticated hug of an Off-White pant, and loved how everything was in quotes, it was very postmodern. But the slow slide of her princess standards kept her awake a night like the pea under her mattresses, and these cultured get-togethers she organised forced her willingly back into the raffia and velvet of her earthbound life.

Suppers often started politely enough. Because heaven, as a paradise, is a care free world of unlimited caviar and no political system to speak of, talk often turned to gossip. The who’s who of the afterlife, the news of the screws. All very gracious of course, and without phones—did I mention there’s no iPhones in heaven? Steve Jobs is livid—this was the only way to keep abreast of goings on. During the main course people loosened up further, and things were notoriously rowdy in parts (Houdini was often an instigator, and Paul Daniels encouraged him). Yet it was somewhere between coffee and Ferrero Rocher that Diana was able to shine, as her guests’ tongues truly loosened. Diana found people opened up to her and she, in turn, was able to really listen to them, to see what they needed and offer support. Not meddle so much as absorb and reflect and possibly offer a little guidance (she reminded people that divorce wasn’t a dirty word and that a Martin Bashir interview can do wonders for the human spirit). And it was at these times she felt at her most useful, her most purposeful, her most people’s princess, her most queen of hearts. Without the need for her charity work, these dinners had come to represent something emblematic for Diana, they gave her a type of catharsis. These dinners had become, in their own way, her new humanitarianism. All she needed before the next one was the flowers.