It seems like 15 years ago.
It was about 6.30 on a Sunday morning and we were at Luton Airport and I became aware of a familiar voice singing a familiar song.
We were easyJetting off on a city break to Amsterdam and I was half-asleep, so I couldn’t place the voice. The album was very, very laidback, almost as blissed-out as Roberta Flack.
Even though I owned the CD, I couldn’t think of the name of the singer, and it was annoying me. Not the music, the fact that I couldn’t name the girl singing Come Away With Me.
So I asked the sales assistant at the desk.
“Who’s this?”
“Norah Jones,” she replied.
Of course! Ravi Shankar’s daughter, produced by Arif Mardin !
I remember that Sunday morning in 2004 for another reason.
That week my friend Amy Lawrence had suggested to her boss Alan Oliver that I wrote something for The Observer, to go alongside a piece by a Manchester United fan, as the big rivals were playing each other in the Super Sunday game.
So I did and we got to Luton Airport and bought The Observer and the headline on my piece was Fergie owes knighthood to Wenger the ‘flat-track bully’.
I wasn’t trying to be provocative or controversial. It was what I firmly believed.