John Akerstrom was a colleague of mine and became a friend over time. I first visited him in Detroit in 1987, when we were both working for AT&T Istel, a subdivision of AT&T. Later, he came to the UK to visit the Istel headquarters. We got on pretty well. John was an interesting and funny guy who taught me a lot. (I was pretty young at the time.) That day, we drove down to Reading together, in the south of England, for a meeting with Microsoft, and after the meeting I drove along the M4 motorway to drop John at Heathrow Airport. He was hoping to catch an earlier flight, so I drove pretty fast. In the end, John asked me to slow down—he wasn't used to our faster motorway speeds. I dropped him at the terminal and hurried back to Redditch for the Istel corporate Christmas dinner. After driving home at about midnight, I was surprised to hear the phone ringing. It was my boss, wanting to know which flight John had boarded, which of course I did not know. After spending most of the rest of the night on the phone to Pan Am, I finally got through and was told John was not on flight 103. That, of course, proved to be incorrect, as I found out at work the following morning. The following days and, indeed, years were quite hard (though no doubt far harder for his family). Lockerbie was on the TV all the time, and not being anyone important, I was not invited to the memorial in the USA. My bosses, who barely knew John, represented the company instead. I eventually achieved some sort of closure by laying flowers at the Lockerbie memorial some years later, where John's name is inscribed. I still remember John and his wit and care, though less frequently nowadays.