By Sam Parker
February 07, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - I imagine for many people alive today, the great politicising event of their childhood came in the form of a tragedy.
The first dreadful hammer of the Luftwaffe passing overhead, the panicked screams at the Dealey Plaza or the bullet holes at Bogside - that key event that propelled you to develop a political consciousness seems more likely to have been one that made you angry than inspired.
But for many of us who were still just 16 on 15 February, 2003, that landmark came in a moment of hope when more than 1,000,000 people descended on the streets of London to march in protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq.
Anti-Iraq war march, London, 2003
It was, we were told, the largest public protest in British history. I still remember the feeling of pride as I poured over the pictures, that sense that we belonged, not to the most 'politically apathetic generation' ever to live after all, but to the most engaged, the most righteous.
Like hundreds of teenagers who didn't make the real thing, students at my school hastily arranged their own small protest, marching through our small rural town chanting and playing anti-war music. We must have looked pathetic, but we didn't care. We were adding a cry to a national roar that made the hairs on the back of our necks stand up.
It didn't even occur to me that it might not work.
But first, let's go back.
Perhaps growing up in a small town in Northumberland - the UK's northernmost, most sparsely populated county - we were a touch parochial. But the events of 9/11 didn't so much politicise my schoolmates as demonstrate to us for the first time that there was a wider world out there at all. Most of us didn't know what the Twin Towers were until they were crumbling in a plume of smoke. None of that 'stuff' - the news, the bickering politicians - had any relevance to us.
