It was twenty years ago today

This week has brought a lot of media coverage of the "biggest ever storm" that hit southern England on the night of 15/16 October 1987. The anniversary has provided an excuse for innumerable reruns of Michael Fish's notorious weather forecast -- "there is no hurricane coming", as well as some unimpressive attempts at conveying the power of the storm through dodgy CGI footage.

Amid all the cliches, however, I learned a couple of things. First, in a perverse sense, Michael Fish was right - the storm was actually quite a bit bigger than your average tropical hurricane, albeit not quite as intense. Second, and more important, the Met Office people had two very good excuses for their failure. French meteorologists happened to be on strike at the time. In addition, in these days of satellite weather imagery it's easy to forget that a mere two decades ago, weather forecasters still relied almost exclusively on reports from ships at sea. They knew there was something brewing in the Bay of Biscay, but as the storm headed north, shipping fled the area, meaning that there was no-one to pass on the word of how nasty it was becoming. Contrast this with the huge rainfalls that hit parts of the UK in July this year: forecasters not only raised the alarm days in advance, but also predicted with amazing accuracy which areas would experience the worst conditions.

This is also, of course, the twentieth anniversary of "Black Monday", 19 October 1987, when US stock prices fell more than 22% in a single trading session. For us money types, this is an event a bit like the assassination of JFK or the death of Princess Diana: you can remember exactly what you were doing at the time you heard the news. (If you care: attending a church youth group meeting, and trying to find Saturday Night Live on TV after a night out, respectively!)

On Black Monday I was helping to staff TD Bank's booth at the annual Treasury Management Association of Canada (TMAC) cash management conference in Toronto. (Wow, those were the days!) As luck would have it, we were the only firm that had decided to include in our display one of the new-fangled Bloomberg market data terminals, which displayed the Dow Jones average on a tick-by-tick basis. As the market began to fall, word quickly spread among the crowd, and our booth was clogged all day with anxious customers trying to see the screen, which was a tiny thing with an orange display. This was, of course, long before most people had mobile phones, let alone BlackBerries. As a result, an equally large crowd was milling around the big bank of payphones that all conference rooms had at that time (but probably don't any more).

I mention these two unconnected events because they are a reminder of just how recent are many of the things that we now depend on in our business and personal lives: satellite communications, on-line data access, mobile phones. Not that these things are an unalloyed blessing: it seems that by next year, it will be possible to use your mobile phone on aircraft. Ryanair has already said that it will be among the first to offer the service, though why it thinks that people who scramble for 99p fares will want to spend £2 a minute for a phone call, I can't imagine.