I remember that day...
I had been woken up early because my grandmother had died overnight. My mother had phoned in to the college and I'd been granted a leave of absence. Then, at about midday, the news came in from my other grandmother's house. My cat of seven years, whom she had been looking after whilst we were having building work done, had also died.
"What a shitty day," I thought as I sat down to watch the NewsRound special. "How could this day get any worse?"
It did.
I was a 17 year old studying science A-levels. I'd collected the whole of Insight, a magazine / encyclopaedia of science in weekly parts with binders, which I read with my father as I grew up, and was filled with the promises of reusable space exploration vehicles; I'd studied the cut-away diagrams of the STS craft and their launchers; I'd stood as close as it was allowed to the giant rocket assembly hangars in Florida; I was a great fan of Dr Who and Blake's 7, with their visions of cities in space and regular off-planet living; I'd stood on the roof of Manchester Airport's terminal building as the 747 carrying a shuttle had overflown the UK that time.
My jaw dropped as the vapour trail rising into the sky unexpectedly split, then mushroomed. A brief flash and the camera changed to a wobbly extreme tele-photo lens. Debris was spreading out and down from the inside of a cloud. I was overtaken by an almost maniacal laughter as the words of the launch controller permeated my cortex.
"We appear to have a major malfunction".
Malfunction? That has to be the understatement of the century.
Then shock, disbelief, rapt fascination, spilt tea.
Then the soothing voice of John Craven, usually so level, a hint of alarm edging his voice. My recall will not be 100%, but it was along the lines of...
"Well, we're going to stay with Cape Canaveral for a while. It appears as though there's been a problem with the launch."
The rest of the evening was just a blur. Analysis, shock, reaction, more analysis, waiting for news of survivors, politicians making speeches, speculative analysis, experts wheeled out, financial analysts making predictions about the future of the space programme which was, for me, the future of mankind.
Every year on this day, I ring my father. I never tell him why. It's because he lost his mother. I'm sure he knows that's why, but he'd never say. Maybe he's not noticed. It's a date etched on my memory, though.