One of the most vivid memories of my youth, and what was perhaps my first real understanding of what a global news story really was, was in January 1986.

I was not long home from school and the daily ritual saw me tuned to the television. If memory serves me right, the Newsround programme had not long finished when a young Phillip Schofield, who was doing the link work for the children’s programmes from the famous BBC broom cupboard, sent us back to Newsround for what today would be a breaking news special. The Challenger space shuttle had exploded shortly after take-off and, in an age before 24-hour rolling news, us kids in the UK were amongst the very first – anywhere on the planet – to be told.

Whilst it was January 28, 1986 that opened my eyes to how the impact of tragedy and disaster knows no bounds, it was events of the following days that served me with an arguably more important life lesson altogether.

Now we have to remember that 1986 was the pre-internet, pre-mobile phone age. Communication was personal, face-to-face, and the corded landline was king (provided, of course, that you put some coins in the wee payment box that sat beside the phone in most people’s homes). Newspapers were everywhere, magazines too; people made the effort to meet, pubs were thriving, and any mention of WhatsApp would almost certainly have been met with a “Not a lot – what’s up with you?”

So, there I was – in the playground of Daliburgh School, listening to, laughing at, and retelling jokes about Nasa – with the full knowledge and appreciation........

© Herald Scotland