Piper Alpha. I remember this night in 1988, unusually warm and the eve of my graduation. In Aberdeen a jacketless evening feels like a holiday. But then, outside the restaurant there was a weight, a prickle-neck darkness that didn’t vanish under streetlights. “There’s something wrong here,” I said. “Don’t be daft,” they dismissed. But there was unimageable wrong going on a little way offshore. All those lives there gone, all those lives here about to stifle under a blanket of agony. The next morning the radio confirmed and, one way or another, none of us would be the same again.
