Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: I'm glad to see these men weep openly

I have never seen the point of football, which means I cannot understand the total adulation of George Best the footballer. In any case, his glory days were over when I landed here in 1972. Most celebs quickly fade away unless they relentlessly top their previous triumphs, but not Best. He was no longer on the pitch, but the memories of his unique talent kept him aloft. And he was unbeatable with his devilish good looks and seductive charms. My ex-husband was crazy about football, and I remember buying him some after-shave Best was advertising on TV.

In the ensuing years, it was hard not to despair of the way this gifted man wasted life, love and hopes. Alcoholism is a disease, of course, but I thought it was still up to him to to keep away from the substance that we all knew would kill him. He has now met his fate and left his devotees bereft - his forlorn father, Dickie; his son, Callum; faithful agent, Phil Hughes; siblings; lifelong friends; fans; players old and new; sports journalists and the women he had and lost. Hughes' crumpled, tearful figure outside the hospital symbolised the sense of loss felt acutely by tough men across the land. James Nesbitt described how they felt in this newspaper: "George was the kind of man, one of a small number, that a lot of men would find themselves in love with." He was beautiful, sexy, rich, undoubtedly talented. He chose a life of masculine excess and defiant optimism about his own immortality, and they adored George Best for this audacity.

I can't feel the massive, inconsolable sorrow that has engulfed millions of his supporters, but I do relate to their open demonstration of grief and loss over the last few days. I know this is an emblematic event, illustrative of a nation irreversibly altered since the Sixties. The dignified stoicism of Dickie Best in the face of this loss - just a slightly quivering voice - belongs to an earlier era, when real men did not cry or scream or reveal the chaos in their hearts.

Hughes reflected the road we have travelled to greater emotional literacy and honesty. The stiff, controlled, inhibited British sensibility took a long time to make and only a decade to break. Sexual freedoms, which exploded in the Sixties, have proved mixed blessings, but other liberties ushered in at the time have led to a sustained transformation of British society. I reckon the feminisation of Britain, which so appals Michael Buerk and others, started then, and a good thing too. Emotions, instead of being held down and back, are now demonstrable in public spaces.

It is even better that, in the past decade or so, Britons have learnt to come out and mourn with others, to mark untimely deaths of individuals - some famous, others only because they died in ways that stirred millions, and yet more killed in a flash at roadsides. Collective mourning is a great healer, as most societies recognise.

A fortnight back, a very dear uncle of mine passed away. The funeral was at one of our mosques in north London. The place was packed with people who knew him and those who didn't. But he was one of us, so they turned up on a Saturday morning to pray in unison, hand him safely to Allah, and to console members of the family who were weeping copiously. When I was growing up, my mother never missed any funeral announced in the mosque, and this tradition is carried on today by the young and old.

That was the first time my English husband had ever entered a mosque, and he said he was moved by this coming together and the way nobody held back from the pain and loss death brings. To me, the bunches of flowers tied to lamp-posts, the bouquets and messages left by strangers at murder spots are exactly that - a sign of society coming together as humans, feeling the distress of relatives, imagining themselves in similar situations and sharing in collective grief.

When Diana died, I went to weep in Kensington Gardens. And there they were, the others who felt devastated by her death - Hells Angels in tears mingling with old Muslim women and young working-class families. We didn't know her, but mourned her because in the media portrayals she seemed so remarkably frank and un-royal. When the anniversary of her death comes round I still feel sad that such a life was extinguished in such a way. And I am glad the grief of millions compelled the royals to publicly recognise Diana's value and to adapt to the changed nation over which they ineptly preside.

The transformation bewilders old souls. A few years ago Peregrine Worsthorne poignantly lamented: "Although living in my own country, I no longer feel at home. Britain is beginning to feel like a foreign land and not a very familiar one either. It is not so much a question of alienation as of mystification ... mystification leaves one in a no man's land where one does not understand what is going on." No doubt George Best's funeral - predicted to draw out hundreds of thousands - will perplex and disorient such folk even more than the reaction to Diana's death.

Then there will be the reactions of the professional cynics and ex-public schoolboys who still believe stiff upper lips are a mark of evolutionary superiority and who ceaselessly mock what they see as a weakening, pathetic and sentimental population. Boris Johnson is the obvious example, he who slagged off Liverpool for being maudlin and too weepy over its tragic dead; and then was forced to issue an apology, showing both how brave he really is and his own emotional illiteracy.

This week we have seen more of the same from the supercilious classes. They pour scorn on government proposals to teach children empathy, so they can understand their peers as they go through difficult experiences. With divorce rates growing, violence getting worse - within schools and in the outside world, increasing instability and fear, children do need to be able to understand their own feelings and relate to others.

Of course if you grew up believing fagging and bullying is the way life is and should be, it is hard to understand why children should be taught to feel such sissy stuff. The rest of us can see exactly why these proposals are needed.

What made George Best want to drink himself to oblivion? What was the darkness in his soul? What pain lay there that he couldn't, wouldn't or didn't share? He was a man of the Sixties in many ways, but was he able to look frankly within himself and achieve any self-understanding? If he had been more easily communicative of his needs, perhaps his best friend would not have been the bottle. That is the saddest aspect of this story, and why I too may shed a tear as he is laid to rest, even if I was not a fan.

y.alibhai-brown@independent.co.uk