22nd November 1963...

It used to be a cliché that one always remembered where one was when the news came through that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I remember exactly where I was…
 
It was a Friday evening, and the band were playing at the British Legion Club in Oldfield Lane in Greenford. Our drummer, Clive, was late arriving, the reason being that the news was just breaking on the radio as he was about to leave the house.
 
It was a considerable shock. With hindsight, I came to realize that Kennedy nearly started the Third World War over the Cuba Missile Crisis and he certainly presided over the start of the Vietnam War. But with all that he was a radical, socially conscious and charismatic leader, and was responsible for mankind getting to the moon.
 
Ironically, both Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis died on the same day; had it not been for the incident in Dallas, surely either of those events would have been headline news.
 
Like the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall, I too became fascinated with the various conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s killing. But the latest high-tech analysis of the evidence suggests that, the grassy knoll notwithstanding, there was after all, just one gunman, and he was positioned in the Texas school-book depository.
 
But the 22 November has further resonances for me… In 1990 on the 22nd November I was sitting in a ponderous budget meeting at EEV, when the MD’s secretary came in with the news that Margaret Thatcher had just resigned. ‘Ah, there is a God!” I exclaimed, and received a poisonous look from the MD for my trouble.