Oh Christ, not again

I had (a month before in 1986) quit my first job after 3 years of bullying and boredom. I was packing my stuff in my trunk to move out of the house I was in and my friend Bernie came round absolutely breathless from the house he and a few other ex-colleagues shared on the other side of the alley behind me.

"The shuttle's blown up!!!" I laughed and told him to piss off, you wanker, stop winding me up. I've left the job, the jokes are over. "No, no, I'm not joking, it's on the TV now, come on!!!" I was instantly sober: we sprinted 200 metres round the block to the house: Neil, Martin, myself and Bernie stood there open mouthed and dry eyed, without a single word exchanged, for nearly an hour, simply trying to absorb the one fact that the shuttle had been destroyed. Neil was in tears for most of the night and the planned send off at the pub later on was a damp squib: all of us engineers, all of us not really believing what had just happened.

I have just read this report and started looking at the news, and I have had a sickening flashback to nearly two decades ago: the same lurch in the gut, the same feeling of panic, the same feeling of real depression at the death of those people. No bones about it: they are dead, no chances.

This is a truly sad day and it makes my troubles seem trivial by comparison.

"Rest Easy, brave comrades".