MOURNING those we never knew has become a weird national sport, according to a report published this week.

Showy sorrow would once never have been the British way, which tended towards stiff-upper lip acceptance. Then, towards the end of the last century, a strange shift took place. Ostentatious grief become the thing, with carpets of flowers in the streets and public wailing for the cameras.

It has always seemed a strange way to carry on, but those participating must presumably draw something from their solemn cavorting.

A think-tank has been addressing this matter and what this tank thinks is that Britain is suffering from a severe bout of "mourning sickness". According to Patrick West, author of the report for Civitas, the Institute For The Study Of Civil Society, people do not care so much as wish to be seen to care.

Firstly, let's give Mr West space to air his theory. His thoughts on why we go in for this mourning mania tend to be couched in tart phrases, such as "conspicuous compassion" and "grief lite".

Mr West believes that those who participate in very public showings of grief, spreading carpets of flowers and cards, "want to be seen displaying compassion because they want to be loved themselves". He traces this phenomenon, not surprisingly, to around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

After Michael Ryan killed 16 people in the Hungerford shootings in 1987, there was, Mr West points out, no national outpouring of grief. Two years later, 95 people died in the Hillsborough football disaster yet the grief was largely confined to Merseyside, where most of the victims had lived.

Yet by 1996, the murders of 16 children in a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane brought a flood of flowers and cards. The death of Diana the following year saw copious public weeping and a mountain of bouquets.

Mr West believes that Diana herself was "an icon of conspicuous compassion". She stood, and this is my phrase not the report's, "for caring about things".

While Diana is almost forgotten, that being the way of life, if only ghoulish elements of the press and television would leave her alone, the public caravan has moved on.

Grief flourished at the death of Linda McCartney, the murder of Jill Dando and the killing of the schoolgirl Sarah Payne. The memory of the murdered schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman caused mountains of flowers and cuddly toys.

Yet while all this public grieving has been going on, as the florists and the card manufacturers have profited, donations to good causes have dropped by 31 per cent.

Mr West, who it has to be said comes across as a little stern, does, however, make a good point when he says that instead of "pilling up damp teddies and rotting flowers to show how nice they are", people could do some "unostentatious good".

Much like a columnist, Mr Wood chooses a phrase that will stand out and get himself noticed. So his words seem, well, ostentatiously tart. Yet for all that, there is much truth in what he says. We do seem to have gone collectively mad, rushing to grieve those we have never known or even met. I don't really understand this at all. A quietly shed tear over a disturbing story on television or in the newspaper, yes, that makes sense. But dashing off on a what might be called a grief demo, that seems weird and not healthy.

Maybe this excitable behaviour links with the way people care more about what goes on in the soap operas than in their own street; or with the mass distraction caused by bug-eating antics in the Queensland jungle.

It could all be part of a bigger confused picture in which, according to the latest official statistics, we spend more on transport than food; and more on alcohol than fresh fruit and veg.

Perhaps we really are a nation of car-bound, boozed-up, scurvy emotional fraudsters who like nothing better than a good public wail, followed by an expensive drive home to watch a large-breasted model gormlessly gallivanting in the jungle. Scary thought.

Updated: 09:58 Thursday, February 26, 2004