Born on 1 January 1991

Back in 1991, the air felt thick with a very specific kind of change, though we were mostly preoccupied with the sheer impossibility of Bryan Adams. You couldn’t nip to the off-licence for a tin of Allbright without hearing *(Everything I Do) I Do It for You* blaring from a car radio; it sat at number one for four months, practically becoming the national anthem by default. It was a year of proper telly moments, too—everyone huddled round for the final episode of *Campion* or gripped by the high-stakes drama of *The Darling Buds of May*, wishing we were all sipping cider in the Kent countryside.

If you went to the pictures, you were almost certainly queuing for *Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves* or getting properly rattled by Hannibal Lecter. I remember it being a bit of a funny year for weather; Feburary brought that "wrong kind of snow" that grounded the trains, yet by the time everyone was obsessed with their new Game Boys or swapping Panini stickers for the Rugby World Cup, the sun was cracking the flags. We’d sit in the park with a Chilly Willy lolly or a bag of Hedgehog Crisps, debating whether the new M40 extension was actually a good idea, blissfully unaware that the world was about to change forever with this new "World Wide Web" thing just starting to flicker into life.

It was a simpler, slower sort of magic, really.