It was 25 years ago today.

It was ten past four in the morning and it was pretty quiet on the news desk. The four o'clock bulletin was out of the way. We were preparing the scripts for the main breakfast bulletins. Shuffling. Subbing. Polishing. Making the verbs agree with the subjects. Razor blading the audio into shape. Making the inarticulate sound articulate. Hammering on manual Remington's with the covers torn off, because this was 1980. December the eighth in fact. It was cold, dark and quiet in the Fleet Street basement.

In the teleprinter room behind us six bells rang out. The UPI wire. Six of them meant this was a big story. Derry bombed? (UPI would have said Londonderry.) El Al airliner (say that on the radio in a hurry) hijacked? Ronnie Biggs caught? Mandela freed?

The rolled paper chugged out of the teleprinter and was torn off against the serrated edge. ****** UPI NEW YORK CITY 1208802310 SNAP - A MAN NAMED JOHN LENNON HAS BEEN SHOT DEAD IN NEW YORK. ENDS.

So what the hell does that mean? How many John Lennons are there in a place the size of NYC? "A man named¦?

So we hit the phones. Get any cop precinct in Manhattan on the blower if we can. You know how those Yankee coppers love a Brit. accent. They'd tell you anything and they'd do it eloquently.

We were drawing blanks when someone rang in on the hotline. "Hullo, this is Jonathan King here. I'm in New York. I've been trying to ring Capital Radio but the security guard says there's no one there and told me to ring IRN. Have you heard about John Lennon?

And with that, the cold December day in London turned very different.

So my life has come round in a circle, and the reason I haven't been causing trouble on these threads for three months is that now I am directing a project for Amnesty International and on Saturday we launch something here: www.amnesty.org/noise.