In honour of Dan-Air Flight 1008 on 25th April 1980
Some memories don’t age; they sit quietly in the soul. As if waiting for the right moment to whisper their reason.
I was just eight years old when my dad cancelled our family holiday. There was no storm, no news alert, no logical reason to call it off. Just a feeling, a deep but unmistakable knowing he couldn’t explain. And so, without resistance or reason, our plans were halted. We never boarded that flight.
Dan-Air Flight 1008 departed from Manchester Airport bound for Tenerife on 25th April 1980. It never arrived. The aircraft crashed near Tenerife North Airport due to a combination of pilot and ATC error. All 146 people on board were lost. There were no survivors.
Even though I was only a child at the time, something stayed with me, a sense that what had just occurred wasn’t just coincidence. That a decision made from instinct, had diverted us from a fate that might have been ours.
As I got older, the weight of that moment had never left me, it only deepened. And I began to ask questions not only about life, but about timelines.
Echoes from a Parallel Thread
It sounds strange, even to say it aloud, but what if I was on that flight, just not in this timeline? What if, on another thread of existence, we did board that plane? And this version of me, the one writing these words, is the ripple of a life that paused, while another one continued?
If no two particles can occupy the same space at the same time, could this be the soul’s way of course-correcting? Not by erasing but just re-routing.
Perhaps my father’s sudden intuition wasn’t only his. Perhaps it was a signal across the bridge of timelines, an inner voice echoing from another version of himself, reaching out with one final whisper: “Don’t go.”
I will close this with a poem I wrote for all those who had lost their lives that day, and to those who had lost loved ones on Dan-Air Flight 1008
Letter to a Parallel Self
To the Me I Never Became
I don’t know your face exactly,
but I feel you in my breath.
The one I didn’t take that day,
the life I left to death.
I think of you sometimes,
not in sadness, but in pause.
You are not gone, you are folded
into a different cause.
We shared a moment once, a flight.
You boarded, I did not.
But still I carry echoes
of the choice that time forgot.
You’re not a shadow.
You’re not a ghost.
You’re not a tale untold.
You are a mirror of a moment
where the universe took hold.
Perhaps it was my father’s voice,
or fate, or soul design.
But somewhere, somehow,
our paths diverged,
and both became divine.
So, if there’s space between the stars,
and time is but a thread,
then know I see you, feel you,
not as lost, but just ahead.
And when I speak of life or soul,
or when I breathe in deep,
you flicker like a candle’s glow
that memory dares keep.
Thank you for the part you played,
and for the path you trod.
You remind me, life’s not just a line,
it’s poetry through God.
Closing Reflection
May this be a small remembrance, not only of lives lost but also of what continues. Of the possibility that consciousness isn’t bound by one single timeline. That your loved ones may still exist in ways unseen. In dreams, in whispers, or even in the gentle nudges of déjà vu.
For those who feel something without understanding why, trust the feeling. It may be your past self, it may be a soul from another thread, or it may just be love, stretching across time still reaching for you.
Caz
The Light Drift 