On the 21st December 1988, the Lockerbie Bombing happened.
I was living at Leicester at the time in 1988, and in fact I was looking forward to my first ever Christmas away from Glasgow. My plan was to spend Christmas in Leicester, and go back home on the 28th for Hogmanay. What was exciting was I was planning to fly up as I didn’t fancy the 7 hour train journey, so I was going to finish work on the 28th, and fly up from Heathrow (we had a warehouse in Staines near the airport) to get back home for last orders that night!
On the evening of the 21st I’d finished work and spent the night in the pub having a few drinks before wandering to the Chinese takeaway near where I lived for some radioactive sweet and sour chicken with fried rice, a pancake roll and some prawn crackers, which was my predictable choice at that time.
While waiting for my meal to be ready I was sitting with a few other people watching the TV, which was showing some mindless crap on the BBC which interrupted by this newsflash.
I asked the owner to turn up the sound, and all of us watched in horror but at that point I utterly freaked as I decided that the idea of flying home for Christmas was a fucking mad idea and that lengthy train journey wasn’t a bad idea after all.
Over the next few days the horror of the bombing became clear, as did the fact it was a terrorist attack, so I took the train home on the 28th and as the train passed Lockerbie, you could see the damage quite clearly, especially the crater that destroyed several houses. Over that trip I also met someone who’d been driving home for Christmas at the time of the crash and saw the fireball hit Lockerbie. Being a good Catholic, and like many of us in the 1980’s, he though that this was the start of a nuclear war as the fireball hit Lockerbie.
As time went on I got over my fear of flying quite quickly, but the official story behind who committed the bombing always didn’t seem real to me. It seemed far too messy with gaping holes, so this really is an opportunity to present Paul Foot’s astonishingly good investigation he did for Private Eye.It’s a crucial piece of journalism so read through it and realise that those who died still haven’t found justice.
Lockerbie: A Flight from Justice.
My Little Underground 