That day 12 years ago will forever be the strangest.
I was home revising for my A-Levels when my mum arrived back from work in the morning and informed me that my grandmother had passed away suddenly, unexpectedly, and at a young age. Essentially, it's my grandmother and my dad moving to Liverpool during his childhood that has determined that I'm a Liverpool supporter and all my memories of time with her (particularly Christmas) are so bound up with imagery or discussion of the Club (not to mention the ridiculous amount of LFC-related gifts...!). Most of my extended family lived about two hours away, so we'd head up there as a family perhaps five or six times a year for the weekend - my brother and I would spend a night each at hers. I carried that on until I was about 14/15 but there came I time when I wanted to be a grown-up and spend the evenings with the generation in between - my parents always stayed with their best friends - so I stopped staying as often as I did when I was younger. I'd say that I regretted that - a year or two of wasted final evenings - but I think it was a very normal teenage reaction and I'm sure she understood that.
The six or seven hours that followed my mum's arrival home were bizarre - my dad returned home early but we left my brother in school - and what I'd hoped would be a day spent reading and watching match build-up just turned into a day where I feel like I sat alone in my room staring blankly at nothing in particular. It must have been half-six/seven, when we eventually all sort of emerged from that day dream - we needed to eat and, as a family, we needed to get round the television and cheer on the Reds. In some ways, watching the match together would have been cathartic regardless of the outcome, but - of course - well, we all know what followed.
Some days I can't believe it's been a whole twelve years; other days I can't believe it's only been twelve. What I do know is that the best and worst of my 10686 days so far - at ridiculous odds - happened to fall on the same one.
It's against all my instincts and beliefs, but if one day I'm proved wrong and somehow she did have a hand in Jerzy's save... I'll not mind