The news events where you remember exactly where you were standing

There is ordinary news, which washes over you, and then there is the other sort — where forty years later you can still tell someone which room you were in, who told you, and what you were holding at the time.

Psychologists call them flashbulb memories, and they are not actually as reliable as they feel. People are often quite wrong about the details while being completely certain. But the feeling of them is real enough, and everyone over sixty has a handful.

The usual suspects

Kennedy, for the older end — a Friday evening here, so most people in Britain heard it on the television or from a neighbour at the door. The moon landing in the small hours, with children woken up specially and put in front of the set. Elvis. Lennon. Diana, on a Sunday morning, from the radio or from someone ringing far too early.

And then the ones that were unfolding rather than announced — the miners' strike, the Falklands task force sailing, Hillsborough on a Saturday afternoon when you had the football on for entirely different reasons.

Why the room sticks and the facts don't

What your brain files away is the shock, and it grabs whatever was around at the time along with it — the wallpaper, the smell of dinner, the fact you were halfway through ironing a shirt. The actual content of the news gets tidied up and rewritten every time you retell it.

Which is why two people who were in the same kitchen will give you two different versions and both be entirely sincere.

The odd ones are the good ones

Everybody has the famous ones. The interesting answers are always the local ones — a factory closing, a bridge coming down, something that happened in your town that never made the national news but emptied every pub in the place for an evening.

Those are the ones worth writing down, because nobody else is going to.