It was the autumn of 1989 when I started in this profession. It was a blur of learning, reporting and trying to write, but the over-riding memory is of the preoccupation, day after day, with a teenage boy on a life support machine.
Tony Bland had been crushed, like so many others, in the Hillsborough disaster five months earlier and his unspeakable injuries had left him in a persistent vegetative state. We reported on his family's struggle simply to be allowed to withdraw life- prolonging treatment and permit him to die with dignity. That took them four years.