The pend which will remain forged to the pain of a generation

Our former Forfar office was a great wee place.

Number 9 Osnaburg Street sat in a line alongside – in order – a fish and chip shop, a bookies and the famed eponymous hostelry on its corner.

Perfect work/life balance in bricks and mortar.

Copywriting and turf accountancy are gone, but the chippie and boozer remain and the pend is still a favourite of artists and photographers by dint of the house which faces into the cobbled street.

Handily for the local press that was the home of former Forfar fire chief, the late John King, a grand lad not averse to giving us a passing shout when his 999 pager went off and he began the dash along the road to the old Academy Street station.

Also long gone is the one-time Gillanders & McLeod bagpipe factory, its air rich with the aroma of exquisitely turned hardwood and the melody of new sets of instruments in an era when drone troubles were not of the variety which could ground traffic at an entire international airport.

Osnaburg Street also sits close to Town and County Hall – always a bit of a double-edged sword due to successive cohorts of cooncillors believing you hadn’t heard enough in the chamber and would appreciate speeches in full again, only on a one-to-one basis in the office but with even greater embellishment and higher expectation of column inches.

But of all those memories, none will remain longer than the sight of a smashed pane of textured glass in its blue frame after vandals struck one winter’s night in the late 1980s.

In itself it was an inconsequential and easily repaired piece of office damage, but the event remains seared indelibly in the mind because it happened on December 21 1988: the night Pan Am Flight 103 blew up in the skies over Lockerbie.

Three decades on, remembrance of the 270 people of 21 nationalities brought a poignant resonance to each side of the Atlantic and well beyond last week.

Even with no connection to Lockerbie or those lost, it is hard not to remain affected by the tragedy, in the same way it was impossible to stop the tears from flowing on a visit to Dryfesdale Cemetery where the memorial to the victims stands.

And for me, a broken pane of glass in an Osnaburg Street office will always be what might be considered the “JFK moment” in a different generation.

Picture: PA. Police officers beside debris in Lockerbie after the downing of Pan Am Flight 103.