THEY’RE called “where were you when...?” moments, and today we remember probably the most momentous of all, the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind.

Another landmark event is President Kennedy’s assassination, which I don’t recall, along with the death of Diana, which I do remember as I was woken by my eldest daughter, who was seven at the time, and most put out because there were no cartoons on the telly.

That’s where we usually end up when most of these seismic shocks occur, plonked in front of the TV.

When the first plane went into the Twin Towers, for example, I was leaving the office for an interview, and colleagues were already starting to gather round the office set. Between Bournemouth and Poole I listened to the story unfold on my car radio. When I turned up for my appointment, a grey-faced man ushered me into his front room, and we silently watched endless replays of those awful images before eventually deciding it might be best if we did the interview another day.

I was driving back across Cranborne Chase as another terrible story, the massacre of children in a Dunblane school, unfolded. I’m not ashamed to say I pulled the car over and cried. Then I turned off the radio. Apparently one particular newspaper the next day went into graphic detail about the slaughter – but even as a journalist I couldn’t bring myself to read it.

Aberfan is another tragedy I remember vividly, despite being very young at the time – and, rather than the first moonwalk, I can see my classmates sitting round the radio listening to American astronaut John Glenn speaking from outer space.

When Manchester United were relegated – Denis Law, then in City colours, scoring with an instinctive back-heel and refusing to celebrate – I was in the Stretford End.

And when Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, I was in China, where the news was relegated to little more than a filler on the international page, in favour of the latest tractor factory statistics.

But the “where were you etc” moment that sticks most in my memory was 3pm, July 30, 1966.

That’s when England kicked off against West Germany at Wembley in what remains to this day the biggest football match in this country’s history.

That’s when I would have loved being in front of the telly, watching the drama unfold. Instead I was on the back seat of a Zephyr Zodiac, cruising back to the East Midlands from our annual family summer holiday in Scarborough.

Dad said we’d get home much quicker because the roads would be empty, and he was right.

He’s never been much of a football fan, my old man, but he sure knew his way around the highways and byways of northern England.

Ask him where he was when Geoff Hurst became the only man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final, though, and he wouldn’t have a clue.