The news headlines on the morning of Saturday 6 January 1973, were little brighter than the prospect of the short, misty and chilly day that lay ahead.

In Belfast on the previous evening, two 15-year-old boys shot dead an 18-year-old as he was putting air into the tyres of his car at a service station on the Shore Road. Another 18-year-old was shot in the abdomen and thigh outside his house in Hannahstown, South Antrim. In Portadown, a grenade was thrown at a Roman Catholic priest and 10 shots were fired at a passing bus on the edge of Belfast. The UDA (Ulster Defence Association) issued a statement calling for the killings to end.

President Nixon informed Congressional leaders that his national security adviser would be leaving for Paris on Monday to resume peace talks over Vietnam. This ‘goodwill gesture’ came after the 11-day aerial bombardment ‘above the 20th parallel’ had ended on 29 December. Operation Linebacker II (or more commonly, ‘the Christmas Bombings’) had involved 273 missions by B52 bombers, the largest heavy bomber strikes launched by the US Air Force since the end of the Second World War.

On mainland Britain, with possibly the same degree of optimism that would accompany Henry Kissinger to Paris, Anthony Barber, Prime Minister Edward Heath's Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in talks with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on ‘Phase Two’ of the government's anti-inflation strategy and as far as that other armed conflict was concerned, the ‘cod wars’ (a dispute between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights) had reached the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Much further afield, the end of the Empire took a step nearer as General Idi Amin ordered 88 British companies to prepare for takeover by Ugandans.

There was some good news, of a sort. Most of the papers on that Saturday morning reported that the Distillers company had offered nearly £22 million by way of compensation to the 410 children affected by thalidomide, and the film version of ‘Oh Calcutta’ (‘a nude romp’) was passed for viewing in London. There was too, for those who could afford it, the prospect of a summer holiday to look forward to: £33 could buy seven days in Rome and £37 would secure ‘guaranteed Sicilian sunshine’.