The world was waiting for them

The Day You Arrived

Sarah

15 · 03 · 1987

On the fifteenth of March, 1987, while most of London was debating whether to trust the suspiciously mild weather or carry an umbrella anyway, you decided it was time to make your entrance, Sarah. The Tube was running — loosely speaking — Thatcher was in Downing Street, Boy George was on every radio in the country, and a pint of lager cost 85p. The world, it's fair to say, had absolutely no idea what was coming.

Margaret Thatcher was running Britain with the kind of certainty that left very little room for anyone else's opinion. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Gorbachev was rewriting the Soviet playbook with glasnost and perestroika, and the Cold War was doing that strange thing where it was simultaneously terrifying and tedious. Closer to home, house prices in London were climbing past £65,000 — a figure that now sounds like a deposit on a parking space — and the country was still arguing about the miners' strike like it had happened yesterday.