It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

-- and we, quite literally, slept through the opening of the Berlin Wall because 9 November 1989 was the day we moved from our rented flat above a shop in Pimlico to a rented flat on the ground floor of a house in South Tottenham, and were so tired out from unpacking boxes and sorting out their contents that we went to bed earlier than usual. And woke the next morning to the incredible-seeming news that part of what we'd spent much of the 1980s working towards -- a Europe whole and free, and free of nuclear weapons -- had come into existence overnight.

The surreality was compounded by "Sunny Jim" Callaghan popping up on Radio Four in that morning's Today programme to solemnly warn the Tsar Russians "not to take advantage" of the Wall's opening. Quite what advantage he thought Gorbachev might take (tanks as well as East Germans making day trips into West Berlin, perhaps?) could only be conjectured -- especially since it was Gorbachev's public abandonment of Honecker's regime the month before which had brought about the Wall's fall.

We have a piece of the Wall, brought back by Judith on a subsequent trip to the former East Germany for the public transport interests for which she was then working. Our very own piece of Cold War history. Quite where the intervening twenty years went remains at issue!