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Food for Thought

I Heard The News That Day

Tim Madigan reflects on the murder of John Lennon.

Like countless others I can still vividly remember learning of the news of John Lennon’s murder on December 8th, 1980. I actually found out about it on the morning of December 9th. As I came to breakfast, my mother told me that “Lennon was assassinated last night.” I laughed, as the words sounded so ridiculous. Surely she didn’t mean the former Beatle, who had just released an album after five years of being out of the public eye? It must have been some politician who’d been killed – after all, the word ‘assassinated’ was usually only used to refer to the fates of world leaders.

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