What was going on when I was born?

LONDON THERE is an old saying here that British politicians should not tangle with three institutions. One is the monarchy. Another is the church. And the third is the British coal miner. Coal's centuries-old role in British energy and the miners' militant tradition has turned their periodic confrontations with British Governments into dramatic struggles. Those struggles frequently upset economic policies, and in 1974 a miners' strike for higher wages brought down the Conservative Government of Prime Minister Edward Heath, by forcing him to call an election, which he lost.

IF practice makes perfect, then the people who would organize an evacuation in case of an accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plants may have taken a step toward perfection last Tuesday, when they made a third attempt to show the Federal Government that enough buses would be available to carry people without automobiles. The bus drill, which was followed by a bigger test of emergency capabilities in Rockland County Wednesday, was held as part of a promise made by the state last spring to the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that New York and the utilities would try to correct those two "significant deficiencies" in the emergency planning for Indian Point. The commission had been threatening to close the two plants, which are in Buchanan and operated by the Consolidated Edison Company of New York and the New York Power Authority. The Emergency Management Agency said in an April report on the March 9 drill that the transportation plan in Westchester was not adequate, partly because the county did not have agreements in place with the bus companies to supply the vehicles, and because some bus drivers had said they would not be willing to drive toward the plant during an accident.

NORMAN, Okla. THE football field was littered with reporters and photographers and television crews. They had come from Ada and Enid, from Duncan and Lawton, from Oklahoma City and Tulsa and Muskogee and Shawnee, from almost any place where Oklahoma football is more than a game. Then there were the fans, dozens and dozens of fans, with their own cameras and pens, eager for a rare opportunity to meet their Oklahoma Sooners in person. And they were all there, almost. That morning, as the mobs were on their way to Owen Field, there was a telephone call for Barry Switzer, the football coach. The call was from Ken Fairley, a friend of Marcus Dupree, the greatest freshman rusher in Oklahoma history. Fairley was making the 12-hour drive here from Philadelphia, Miss., with Dupree and his mother. He was calling to tell Switzer that this ride would be much longer than 12 hours. Switz er's tailback was somewhere outside Little Rock, Ark. There had been car trouble. They were going to be late.

A military shield was applied last week in Chad by 3,000 of France's best troops. Whi,e they manned a line against furth?r advances southward by Libyan-backed rebels, President Francois Mitterrand tried diplomacy to end the fighting and preserve the former French colony from what he saw as Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's designs on Islamic Africa. Paris no longer spoke of ''advisers'' or ''instructors.'' In a long interview with Le Monde, Mr. Mitterrand issued a warning to Colonel Qaddafi: France has the means, ''if necessary, to answer militarily and quickly any new offensive.'' There has been a lull in the fighting and Mr. Mitterrand asserted the French intervention had been decisive in bringing it about. Explaining why France had waited so long, to Washington's distress, the President said he wanted it to be clear to the world that the aggression came from Libya and that he did not wish to embroil France in a civil war. Two American Awacs planes, sent early on to Sudan to monitor Libyan air and ground movements, were withdrawn last week with the explanation that the military stalemate made their presence no longer necessary. They were part of the tiff between Paris and Washington, which Mr. Mitterrand said had now been settled.

ANDREW CUOMO, the Governor's son and adviser, crouched in front of a map of the state's counties last week, pointed to Suffolk and Nassau and declared, "The Island will be swing." The 25-year-old Mr. Cuomo has been assigned by his father to help sell the "Rebuild New York Bond Issue" to a voting public that has often resisted appeals to increase the state's indebtedness. If Andrew Cuomo and a cadre of other gubernatorial advisers assigned to the task convince enough New Yorkers to vote "yes" in November, the Cuomo administration will be authorized to spend $1.25 billion on improvements to the state's net-work of roads, bridges, rails, ports and mass transportation. Armed with enough past performance statistics to rival a tout at Belmont, Andrew Cuomo has concluded that the suburban voters of Long Island, Westchester and three or four counties upstate constitute the swing needed to win bond issue approval this fall.

Two errors by Roy Smalley in the bottom half of the ninth inning gave the California Angels a 7-6 victory over the Yankees tonight. Smalley's mistakes made a loser of Rich Gossage, who began the inning by striking out the pinch-hitter Daryl Sconiers. Bob Boone followed with a single and Brian Downing with a walk. Smalley's first error came when he mishandled Rod Carew's chopper to shortstop, which loaded the bases. A single by Juan Beniquez scored two runs to tie the game before Gossage retired Doug DeCinces on a fly ball. Then Bobby Grich singled, with Smalley again bobbling the ball and then throwing it into the dirt on its way to first base. Carew scored the game's winning run on the error.

The countdown began this afternoon for the next space shuttle mission, one that will include a nighttime launching and landing, the deployment of a satellite for India, tests of a new air-to- ground communication system and a black astronaut. The five astronauts who will fly the space shuttle Challenger arrived here this morning for final briefings before the flight. Officials of the Kennedy Space Center said preparations were proceeding smoothly toward a scheduled liftoff Tuesday at 2:15 A.M., New York time. Commanding the planned six-day mission, the eighth in the shuttle program and third for the Challenger, will be Capt. Richard H. Truly of the Navy, who was a pilot on the second test flight of the Columbia in 1981. The other crew members will be going into space for the first time. They are Comdr. Daniel C. Brandenstein of the Navy, Lieut. Comdr. Dale A. Gardner of the Navy, Lieut. Col. Guion S. Bluford Jr. of the Air Force and Dr. William E. Thornton, a physician.

WASHINGTON FOR weeks, President McKinley had procrastinated over whether to annex the Philippines. In 1898 Washington was divided between those who saw the islands, one of the spoils of the Spanish- American War, as strategically vital to American political and commercial interests and those who were unhappy with the concept of colonization. Finally, as he later related, he chose humanitarian reasons to justify the strategic decision. ''I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight,'' he said, ''and I am not ashamed to tell you that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night, late it came to me this way - I don't know how it was, but it came, that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them.''

The breakup of the Bell System has created several new subsidiaries, among them A.T.& T. Information Systems. To house this new entity and give it a headquarters, the Sudler Companies of Newark will build and then lease to the company an 800,000-square-foot office and research facility in Middletown Township, Monmouth County N.J. The site is a 258-acre plot at Laurel Avenue and Holland Road.

With much confusion and some apprehension, hospital officials around the country are preparing for a new Medicare system under which the Government will pay uniform prices for the treatment of particular ailments. The new system represents the biggest change in Medicare since the health insurance program for the elderly was created in 1965. Hospital officials said it would give them strong new incentives to control costs and to reduce the length of stay for Medicare patients. But they also warned that the new system could make it more difficult for some patients to get medical services. Erie D. Chapman 3d, president of the 1,092-bed Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said: ''Hospitals will have an incentive to keep costs down. That economic incentive simply has not been there until now.''

WHEN he was assistant refuge manager of the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in the Florida Everglades, Roger Spaulding often worried about alligator poachers. Now, on Long Island, he sometimes worries about tree poachers in Shirley, where he manages the Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge. Wertheim -- until 1974 a private hunting preserve -- is the largest of eight widely scattered national wildlife refuges on the Island. From his rustic office in the former hunting lodge along the banks of the Carmans River, where he oversees the management of all these refuges, Mr. Spaulding readilty agrees that "everyone seems to want something out of the refuges." The National Wildlife Refuge system, begun 75 years ago by Theodore Roosevelt to serve as "inviolate sanctuary" for the nation's wildlife, has swollen over the years to include some 90 million acres on more than 400 separate refuges in 49 states. Recently, the system has come into the public eye as Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt began applying pressure on the Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the system, to expand the economic uses of the refuges.

Jacques Barzun is professor emeritus of cultural history at Columbia University. The following essay is part of a lecture on ''Art and Criticism in 18th-Century France'' delivered at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth last spring. Everybody knows that Denis Diderot was a mathematician, philosopher, physiologist, novelist and playwright, as well as the author of great dialogues such as ''Rameau's Nephew'' and the tireless editor of the huge ''Encyclopedie'' that molded advanced opinion in Europe for a hundred years after the appearance of its first volume in 1751. What is less well known is that he was the first regular reviewer of art exhibitions. He discussed the Paris Salon, where painters exhibited bi- yearly, 12 consecutive times, from 1759 to 1781, penning his critiques in such a way that the thickest mind and slowest eye would be aroused to think and perhaps to see. No parallel to this monumental work - 1,000 closely packed pages - could be cited until George Bernard Shaw, in the late 1880's, did the exact same thing.