Going back to Lockerbie - 1 year on

It's almost 25 years since the Lockerbie bombing.  Last year during a trip to Moffat with friends I went to Lockerbie to try and find the memorial to the disaster but I didn't find out in advance where it was, and I didn't dare ask anyone where it was once I got there, in case I was intruding on someone's grief, so I never found it.  The full story of that trip of exactly a year ago can be found here.

This year I went back to Moffat and this time I did my research and so on Saturday I actually found the memorial.  As soon as I got off the bus I felt a bit dumb because the first thing I saw was a sign directing me to it, and I wondered how I never found that last year.

The memorial garden and the small visitors centre are situated about 1 mile from the centre of Lockerbie on the A709 to Dumfries.  It took me about 20 minutes to walk there from the bus stop in the town centre.

The memorial is at the far end of Dryfesdale Cemetery, maybe 5 minutes walk from the main road, and there are a lot of single graves you have to walk past before you get to it.  The thing about regular graves is that they are all individual.  Each person has died an individual death, most of the people are relatively old, most cases they've died of natural causes, and the dates of death are all different.

Somehow that makes it all the more jarring when you arrive at the memorial to the Lockerbie bombing because every plaque or tribute has the same date of death on, ie 21st December 1988, and many of the individual plaques are for people who were 20 years old when they died, which is the same age I was when I saw the coverage of the disaster on TV.

There is a small sign at the entrance to the memorial garden that explains that the 270 victims were from 21 different countries, and the range of ages was from 2 months old to 81 years old, and it's not to minimise the deaths of people of other ages, but I identified most with the people my own age, and it was a genuine surprise to me how many of them there were.

I didn't know before I went that 35 of the people who died were university students from Syracuse University in New York, who were returning home from European placements.  All the birth dates were 1967 or 1968, so they would all have been in the same academic year as me.

In the last 25 years, my life has had its disappointments and mistakes and foul-ups, but seeing the graves of so many of my contemporaries made me feel grateful to have had those years from 1988 up to now.  Because choices and opportunities and the freedom to make decisions about your future as a grown up and maybe mess things up along the way, are luxuries those who die young don't have.

At the rear of the memorial garden is the main memorial wall, and this lists all 270 people who died in the bombing and subsequent crash, in alphabetical order.  What I noticed immediately was how many clusters of names there were with the same surname, which meant that whole family groups had died.  I couldn't imagine the devastation of even losing one person, but what of those who lost entire families?  It doesn't bear thinking about.

I don't cry very often, and I didn't cry at Lockerbie on Saturday, but I was reminded of the last time I did, which was at the Gandhi memorial in Delhi.  I think it was probably partly a release of all the tension of getting to India in the first place, but the inscription on the walls there said 'Violence is Suicide', and somehow just reading that brought me to tears and while I was stood at the Lockerbie memorial it came back to me how true that sentiment is.

After I'd read slowly through all of the 270 names I walked back to the Visitors Centre and went inside.  A cheery Scottish lady greeted me.  I told her that I didn't really know why I was here but that I just wanted to come.  She said it's important to the families to know that people still remember.

She herself was a resident of Lockerbie and I asked her if she remembered the night of the crash and she said she did, and she showed me on a map where she lived, and told me that some of the plane fell in her garden, and she was lucky it didn't fall on the house, and I said 'Lucky would have been if none of it had happened', but then I wished I hadn't said it because, if you experience a terrible thing, maybe it's a comfort to think of how it could have been even worse.

She also said that home is where you should feel safe, and yet that was where those Lockerbie residents were when they were killed.  And I thought about that, I thought about the fact that getting on a plane carries a risk, and how you maybe think about that before you get on one, but you don't expect to die in your living room while you're watching TV or getting ready for Christmas, but that happened to those people in Lockerbie, whose homes were destroyed by falling pieces of aircraft.

She said she'd been working in the visitors centre 8 years and she's met many of the relatives of the dead, and I noticed there were lots of seats where people can just sit and contemplate, and there's a memorial book called 'On Eagle's Wings' which was compiled by the mother of one of the victims, and in it there's a page for every person killed, and a pictures of each of them, and amongst other things, it said that the purpose of the book is to remind people that each of the 270 dead is not just a number, not part of a statistic, but someone who was loved, and who is missed every day by the people left behind, and I read as many as I could, and again I was drawn more to the people my own age, but on every page there was a story of personal tragedy that could break your heart.  On every page a story of unbearable loss.

The bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie was timed to go off over the sea, so that the evidence wouldn't be recovered, but because the plane set off late it exploded over land.  And that randomness was one of the most haunting things about the tragedy for me.  The bombers had specifically targeted Pan Am, most of the people on the plane were American and it was Americans they wanted to kill, but the plane coming down over Lockerbie, that was truly random.

I have no connection whatsoever to anyone who was killed at Lockerbie and yet I felt a very powerful urge to go there.  And when I got there I found it unsettling, and moving, and sad, and incomprehensible, and lots of other things that I can't explain in words.

I don't know how the families of the dead carry the burden of their loss, but a thought occurred to me as I left the visitors centre to walk back into the town.  I wondered if the fact that it happened over a town instead of over the sea, at least there was a focal point to their grief.  It gave them somewhere to come to, and the community there embraced them and cared for them, and it pulled together and helped in any and every way it could, and those bonds survive till this day.  Maybe the fact that their loved ones died in a place, rather than being scattered at sea, is a comfort in some way.  I don't know.  Who knows how anyone really feels in a situation like that?

Before I left, I wrote my name in the visitors' book, but I didn't write any comments, because what can you say that makes any sense of any of it?

I still can't define why I went, I don't know what it means to pay your respects, or what remembrance  is, but somehow by going to Lockerbie I wanted to acknowledge that this terrible thing happened, and I wanted to register my own sadness that these things happen at all, a sadness that people can be so far removed from any kind of empathy, that they will willingly murder and destroy and ruin the lives of others, with no thought of the consequences.

After leaving Lockerbie, I caught the bus back to Moffat, and I spent the evening with friends, talking and laughing and sharing a meal, and I was glad that I had that life to go back to.  I was glad to have a community of my own to be part of, who support me and who love me.  And I felt grateful for my life.  For all of it.  The good parts and the bad.  Because not everyone is so lucky.

Things I don't see the point of - Part Four. Short bus journeys and eating competitions on trains

I went to Leeds on Sunday (from Darlington).  By bus and by train.  Car would have been quicker but public transport has more nutters.

There are many, many things I don't understand in life, and here are two new ones:

1) Why do people eat so much on trains,
2) Why do able-bodied people take incredibly short bus journeys?

I caught the 0950 train from Darlington, which arrived in Leeds at 1055.  A journey of just over an hour.  There was a family sat near me, all smartly dressed, looked like they were heading to a christening or some other family event, the women and girls were in dresses, the boys in smart shirts and trousers.  There were about nine of them, and between them they had about 16 Sainsbury's carriers.

The train hadn't even pulled out of Darlington, and 2 litre bottles of pop and family packs of Doritos and sandwiches and biscuits and cakes and just about everything else that Sainsbury's sells were piling out of the carriers and into their faces.  It was like one of those American eating competitions where, for example, someone has to eat 50 pickled eggs in a minute.  As for me, I'd had breakfast at home, and I was having lunch at my mum's.  I wasn't going to starve or die of dehydration during a 1 hour train journey.  A variation on this is when people on the York train have to sink 5 cans of lager each on a 45 minute journey to York when they're going to be drinking all day when they get there.

But people stuffing themselves stupid on trains wasn't even close to being the dumbest thing I saw on my trip to Leeds.  That honour was reserved for the phenomenon of the pointlessly short bus journey.

It started in the centre of Leeds.  A Russian man got on the bus, and asked the driver to take him to the bus station.  It's just there, the driver said, and pointed out the window at the bus station less than 100 metres away.  Just walk.  In mangled English the Russian man then explained that he wanted to catch the bus.  But it's just there!  the driver repeated.  'How much is it?', asked the Russian.

It isn't anything, said the driver.  Journeys that short, I don't even have a fare for that, just walk!  Rather than actually start his shift by throwing a Russian off a bus, he did in fact take him on the 30 second journey to the bus station, and let him ride the bus for free.

About 5 minutes later I saw a guy running alongside the bus with his arm out, with a young girl on a micro-scooter scooting along beside him.  He looked like the most desperate man to get on a bus since Keanu Reeves in Speed.  And so the bus stopped for him, and then they got off at the next stop!  If he'd carried on running he would have been there as quick as the bus.

That wasn't even the end of it.  When I got to Garforth three young lads with skateboards and those big cans of Monster energy drink were waiting at the bus stop on Ninelands Lane.  They got on and went upstairs on the bus, but no sooner had they sat down, then they were back down the stairs to get off at the skate park, which was the next stop.

Speaking for myself, I was always pretty shit on a skateboard, but my recollection is that riding one was a lot more strenuous than a 100 yard walk.  And these lads were about to go jumping on and off half-pipes and probably breaking their ankles, and yet they couldn't actually walk to the skate park.

When I was their age, I used to walk over 2 miles to school every day, just to save the 15 pence bus fare, so I could spend it on sweets, and when I was older, to put it towards pints of beer.

Another Sunday when I was waiting at the bus stop near my mum's to catch a bus into Leeds, there were two young lads waiting with me at the bus stop.  We seemed to be waiting ages for the bus, but it probably seemed like longer because the two of them were noisily discussing an app they were playing with on their phones, where you had to create a plague or virus and let it loose on the world, and the more people you killed, the higher the score.  I can't even begin to describe how dull the conversation was.

The only interruption to their game was when one of their phones kept ringing, they were obviously getting calls from another friend asking what time they would be home.  They kept saying to the friend 'We're just waiting to get the bus back down our end'.  My mum lives at the top of a hill in a place called Kippax, and some of Kippax is at the bottom of the same hill.  In bus stop terms, it's about 3 stops away.  It turns out that's where 'their end' was, because that's where they got off.  So, they waited around 20 minutes, during which they managed to annihilate the entire planet with a virus, and then they went 3 stops on a bus to get home, which took less than a minute.  That hill's so steep you could roll down it in less than 5.  In fact, you'd be so gravity assisted going down there you probably wouldn't even burn a single calorie, it's almost steep enough to abseil down.  And the phone calls they'd been having with their friend, if the friend had opened his window, they were so close they could have shouted to each other instead.  Unbelievable!

I actually walk places for fun.  A few weeks ago I walked the 3 miles each way to work, just to see how long it would take me.  Sometimes in the evening if I haven't been out all day, I just go off for a pointless wander, just to feel the fresh air, and to maybe notice things like trees and flowers, and the design of houses.  Admittedly this has become more hazardous lately, because there's bloody conkers everywhere, and one of these days, I'm gonna turn my ankle, but hey ho.

There is a bus stop at the end of my road where I could catch a bus into Darlington if I wanted.  But it's less than a mile.  Why would I bother?  I haven't even checked the bus times.

I just don't get it!  Do you?


Update - July 2014
Six months after writing this, I ended up moving to Leeds.  It wasn't just to avoid having to spend so much time on buses and trains but it could have been!  The six months between writing this and moving I pretty much walked to work every day.  3 miles each way.  I lived in Darlington for 11 months in total, and I never caught a bus once during my time there.  I used to catch trains a lot but that was because I had to travel long distances, that were beyond walking, and I was off cycling at the time.  I do occasionally catch buses now I live in Leeds, but it has to be for a minimum of 2 miles.  And even then I feel I'm being lazy.