WHERE WAS I?

Thanks Peter! Love these things:

Where was I when I learnt about:

Princess Diana's death - 31st August 1997

In our first little flat, on the phone to my mom. It was really early and I had panicked getting out of bed to answer the phone. Good news can wait, bad news can't. I had thought of my nephew, then of Tony Blair. I was always sure Blair was going to be assasinated because he seemed too good to be true. Mom was crying when she told me about the Princess, then I did too.


Margaret Thatcher's Resignation - 22nd November 1990

Oddly, I don't remember the actual resignation, but I remember one of the votes of 'no confidence' or whatever it was that shoved her towards the end. I was in a mini-bus with my sixth form friends, coming back from the theatre in Warwick uni where we had seen a very inspiring production of Volpone. Mr Lester had the radio on and they announced the results. It felt very momentous. It was.


Attack on the twin towers - 11 September 2001

In a hotel room, in mid-town Manhatten, New York. I was pretending to be asleep so that Steve would have to start the packing (we were flying home that day), and he put the TV on to wake me up. ABC showed one of the towers on fire. They were speculating that it was a serious gas leak, or maybe even that a light aircraft had hit the side. It was surreal, because we had been up there just the night before. It wasn't until claims that the second tower had been hit that the wonderment changed into fear. No accident. And no light aircraft either. Passenger jets? I went down into the hotel's lobby to use a phone to call my folks, just to say we were OK, but everyone in the hotel had got there before me. The look on everybody's face. The young people crying down the phones in various languages. My mom, when I eventually got to speak to her, was surpringly chipper, right up until the moment she realised that Steve and I were still in New York.


England's World Cup Semi Final against Germany - 4 July 1990

At home with my mother and one of my brothers, who kept chanting stupid things as if a win depended on him saying the right things at the right time. He never bothered with football normally. I was in love with Toto Schillaci. I stopped talking to my History teacher because he had said he was a car thief. The summer of 1990 is my Summer of '69.


President Kennedy's Assasination - 22 November 1963

Nope, sorry, before my time. But I like to think I'd have been drinking soda in a five and dime store, wearing a pretty dress and crying really hard.