h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I saw a conversation Ask earlier today which piqued my interest. It's about where-were-you-when-you-heard... moments. I didn't reply to it because Ask isn't something I get involved with these days, but it did get me thinking about some of my own, and about recording them here. No, I don't remember where I was when I heard about JFK, but there are plenty of others.

Elvis Presley: I was in a pub in Liverpool, playing, er pool. Someone poked their head around the door and said Elvis had died. The whole place went quiet and people started wandering off home.

John Lennon: I heard it on the 6am news on Radio 4 which was my the time my radio alarm was set for. That would have been 1am in New York, which I think was only an hour or two after it actually happened.

Freddie Mercury and Viv Stanshall: They both died on a Sunday because I remember hearing about both of them either before I went out to work at around 11pm (Viv) or while I had the radio on through the night (Freddie).

John Peel and Douglas Adams: Both of those I remember very well, but not the exact circumstances of when I heard the news, which is odd because you'd think those would both stick very clearly in my mind.

The Moorgate tube crash: I was heading up to Keele University that day to visit a friend for the weekend. I had to go into central London to catch a train and found myself caught up in the mayhem because I went through Liverpool Street, which is very close. Next station, in fact, at least on the Circle Line.

The Challenger disaster: I was in my workshop in Hoxton and it came over the headlines at the beginning of PM. Both my business partner and I stopped sanding/sawing/planing to listen to the news story.

The Columbia disaster: The former Mrs Gosho and I were getting ready to go out to the farmers market on a Saturday morning when we heard it on the radio. Car Talk would normally have come on at 9am but KUT extended the Weekend Edition coverage.

The Harrods bomb: I actually heard it, on a Saturday, while in the same Hoxton workshop.

The Heysel Stadium disaster: Again, at the workshop, one weekday evening. I was standing outside the door around 7pm, thinking about getting ready to go home, and there was a minor accident at a junction a few yards far away. Right here as a matter of fact http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=51.533392,-0.083035&spn=0.000759,0.002064&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=51.533392,-0.083035&panoid=xJQA8JM3ufdH15dv0tUYkA&cbp=12,198.46,,1,5.32 (blimey, looking at that doesn't half bring back some memories, although the workshop is long gone. There are houses built where it, and all the other workshops in that row, used to be. I wonder if they kept the cellar or filled it in?). A bloke who was walking past at the time said to me something like "The world's gone crazy. Car accidents here and people getting killed at a football match in Belgium". It wasn't until I got home and saw the footage I realised how bad it was.

The Kings Cross fire: The woman I was sharing a flat with at the time (flatmates, no hanky panky) came in one evening and casually mentioned there was something going on at Kings Cross tube station. We turned on the television to see the awfulness unfolding.

England winning the Headingley Test in 1981: It was Tuesday afternoon (they still had a rest day on Sunday then), I was at work, and I had a little transistor radio that had one of those old school deaf-aid earpieces which I jammed in my ear and plugged into the tranny, which I squeezed into a jeans pocket somehow. A few weeks later I missed seeing Botham's innings of 118 in 102 balls on the Saturday of the Old Trafford Test because a friend was getting married that day. I do remember leaving for the church and being asked when I got there how the game was going. "Oh, Botham's just getting himself settled in at the crease" I said.

Lockerbie: I was in the van, in central London with a couple of friends when it came over the news. One of my friends had links to Lockerbie and knew it well. I remember her saying how small the place was and it must have been obliterated if a jumbo jet fell out of the skies and landed on it. She got very upset.

The fire at Bradford City football ground: I was watching World of Sport when they started reporting it live. I'll never forget the footage of that poor bloke whose entire body was alight, from head to foot, walking across the pitch as nonchalantly as if he was out for an evening stroll, before people got him to the ground and covered him in blankets, or whatever it was they had, to put the flames out, and the pleas of the commentator for someone to do help him before those people got to him. He didn't live more than a day or two after that.

Ian Curtis: I heard the news about his suicide on the Monday morning, and they mentioned later in the day that he'd been watching the film Strozsek the previous evening. It struck me that I'd been watching the same, very depressing film, at the same time as Ian Curtis. I turned the TV off and went to bed with thoughts of a Monday morning and another working week, while he got ready to hang himself. For a long time I had it in my mind that it was one of Alex Cox's Moviedrome films, which were shown at the same time on a Sunday night (around 10.30pm), but it couldn't have been because Moviedrome started in 1987.

Tony Blair winning the 1997 election: I drove up to Norfolk the day after the elction - I had to deliver some furniture to a village near Kings Lynn. I remember the weather being picture perfect, and naturally I had the radio on listening to the coverage, which we all knew was a foregone conclusion anyway, and thinking how great it was that we'd got rid of the Tories after 18 years and how much better everything was going to be. Little did we know what was to come, just as most of us had no idea about what was to come after the 1979 election.

However, something good did come out of the day. I harvested some seeds from wild plants growing in the garden of the woman who owned the furniture because I'd recently got into the idea of turning the flowerbeds at home into mini meadows. A few days later I did another job, moving a sofa from a place in Hackney to a house in Highbury. The woman who owned it was a keen gardener, and I was a bit keen on her , so I put some of the seeds in an envelope with a note, and posted them through her letterbox a few nights later as I was out working, not really expecting anything to come of it. The seeds proved fruitful though because they led to a very steamy (and all too brief) liaison

Princess Diana: I came home one Saturday night, in the small hours and somewhat the worse for wear, and put the radio on as I was drifting off to sleep. By that time (3am) Radio 4 had closed down and the World Service was on. The news bulletin mentioned there'd been a car crash in Paris and the Princess of Wales had been hurt. By the time I woke up, soon after 9am, it was wall-to-wall. That entire week is very vivid in my memory, not least going to Buck House on the Sunday evening and seeing flowers starting to pile up outside the railings, and going to a Promenade concert at the Albert Hall on the Thursday, which meant walking past Harrods, where there was also a huge pile of flowers. The perfume that comes off so many blooms all in the same place is quite intoxicating.

Hugh Gaitskill: I was only six when he died and I don't remember hearing the news, but I was already aware by then that people decomposed after they died and I clearly remember asking my parents what would happen to his moustache after he was buried.

What I find surprising is the ones that haven't stuck in my mind, like Eric Morecambe, Ronnie Barker, Benny Hill, the Queen Mother, Winston Churchill, even Patrick Moore, who died just this year, or Thatcher. I guess I couldn't have been doing anything particularly memorable when I heard about those.

For me the list is rather short as I have a memory like a colander, apparently.

The first of these snapshot moments for me was the death of my great grandmother. We were just back from a vacation and my friend was going to sleep over. We had to call his parents to pick him up. Not very historical, but still.

Then it was the death of Lennon. Dad told me in our living room. I was devoted to the Beatles at that time, rabidly so. I was in a weird place mentally and liked them for very odd reasons. I enjoyed their music, of course, but I also considered that no one would harass me about liking the Beatles, they were safe. I was horrendously afraid of any further ostracizing and also didn't want to upset my parents as I didn't want any undue attention from them either. Major Depression is a hell of a thing.

Then Challenger. I was at home in between classes at Jr. College. I think it actually happened while I was on my way home, as it was probably already on steady repeat when I turned the television on.

9/11 I was here at work. We watched it play out live.

Columbia, I'm a bit fuzzy on that one. I think I was at home... that was on a Saturday, I believe. I had to scan film from the wreckage and the field investigation. It wasn't a pleasant. I didn't try to remember much from that.

I was, still am, a huge fan of the Beatles. John Lennon was killed on my birthday (although being at boarding school at the time I only heard about it the next day)

I also remember the Hillsborough disaster. Mostly because I tuned in to see if I could see my grandad who was a steward at the match (luckily for him he was down at the Forest end)

Hysel - I was in my friends room in the single accommodation at our base in Krefeld, we had opened a bottle of wine and had invited over (even though it was against the rules) to watch with us. Shocking.

I want to add a few more. They're related to world events but they're in the same vein.

Till Death Us Do Part: I remember the first scene I saw of that programme. Alf and Mike were coming home from the pub, both completely bladdered, both singing at the tops of their voices, and when they got the back door Alf started banging on the old tin bath that was hanging up.

I know I was already aware of Till Death Us Do Part. I must have heard about it at school - I was ten at the time. And I suppose my parents must have decided to give it a go. After that we watched it every week.

Pirate radio: I was off school and in bed with one of the childhood diseases - measles, chickenpox, one of those. My dad came into the bedroom with the transistor radio, a Murphy, and my goodness, there's a page for it on teh interwebz http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/murphy_b485b_48.html It came with a very natty leather case which you can see in some of the thumbnails on that page.

He must have thought I was feeling bored because he said that he'd just found the new radio station that everyone was talking about, Radio Caroline, and he left me the radio to listen to. Caroline started broadcasting in March 1964 so it must have been April, May or June, maybe early July (after that school would have been on holiday), but I spent the next three years listening to the pirates whenever I could, especially Big L, until the government shut them down

*Not* related to world events

Come to think of it, I can remember another one.

Amy Winehouse: I was at work, I'd just sat down at one of the computers in the office to do some admin and I decided to take a look at the BBC news page for some reason. When I saw the headline I said "Bloody hell, Amy Winehouse is brown bread!", which triggered yet more comments about my vocabulary and colloquialisms

with Amy Winehouse I had just bought a novel called 27 (about those who die young - actually I still haven't read it) and was in the car on the way home from the shops, and there was the 27 year old Amy Winehouse joining the club

Strangely enough, of all the deaths that have ever impinged on my life, the one I remember feeling most genuinely upset about was Richard Whiteley.

All amateur psychological analysis welcome...

B

I can see that. For me I think it'll always be Peely, but I reckon Her Maj will come a close second when she drops off the twig.

Speaking of Peel

I used to listen to Peel on the radio when I was in the 6th form (much much better than slaving over essays about Russian poetry and the like) and when I was at home in the holidays, and later when I lived with my parents on base for a while, I listened to the show he did for BFBS. He used to do the most fantastic trailers for his weekly show and I always tried to record them. Often I was out when the show was broadcast so my lovely mum used to leap into my bedroom and stick a C120 in the cassette radio and record it for me, she'd run back up an hour later to turn the cassette over to catch the 2nd hour.

When he died I was in the UK on holiday, I'd been shopping with my mum to Meadowhell and we were stuck in traffic on our way home when it was announced on the radio. And we both got a bit of a lump in our throats. (turned out she actually used to listen to quite a lot of Peel's show if my dad was watching something on the TV that she wasn't interested)

You have no idea how valuable those tapes would be to some people now. Not in terms of money, but compiling a collection of Peel shows. I used to tape his shows too, and I still have some of the later ones, but for a time I was like the BBC during the 60s - I didn't consider they'd be worth keeping and tape was expensive, so I pulled the songs I liked off them (without Peel's links, which were often the best part of the show), and recorded over it. But there others who didn't do that and still have their recordings, although not always in full, and they've turned them into mp3s. There's a list at the John Peel Wiki.

Which I just had a look at the front page of http://peel.wikia.com/wiki/John_Peel_Wiki and I had no idea that the E in Mark E Smith stands for Edward

how I wish I still had the tapes

Same here You can get mp3s of a lot of old Peel shows by following links on the Peel Wiki, and I'd recommend following @keepingitpeel on Twitter too, for more of the same.

And there's this, of course F50359?thread=8305170

I certainly shan't forget where I was when I heard that Nelson Mandela had died - I was trying to get news of the storm surge and floods that are currently going on down the east coast of England, hoping that my friends in Lowestoft are okay. I think they probably are because, according to the maps of affected areas on the Environment Agency website, it looks like they're not in an area that's likely to be flooded, despite being only a few hundred yards from the beach.

Radio 4 has turned into an all-Mandela all-the-time station, so I've switched to BBC Radio Suffolk, and I'm glad to hear from the reports that so many people are sanguine and pragmatic about the situation, and accepting of the fact that sometimes you can't win against Mother Nature, instead of ranting, raging and blaming anyone they can.

And it also makes me realise how much more reasonable, reasoned, civil, community-minded and just downright nice local radio is, compared to the brashness and combative nature of many of the news presenters on the national stations.