Anniversary

I was at work. Bored. Trawling through the Guardian website when a newsflash caught my eye.

I remember watching the events unfold on News 24, watching the black smoke issuing from the towers and thinking "it's going to take them days to put that out".

Of course it didn't. The whole event had a feeling of complete unreality about it. The French documentary shown about a year later had such a powerful effect largely because it had two elements that were missing from the original footage - proximity and sound. The long shot of the aircraft hitting the second tower had a dreamlike feeling - it seemed to happen in slow motion. It couldn't be real could it?

I'd been exchanging emails with my old school friend Frankie the day before - I was planning a trip to the states and spend most of the 10th checking flights and prices. Frankie was working in DC close to the Pentagon. We didn't hear anything for three of four days and were worried.

The silence was mainly because he had an inbox full of "are you alright" emails and it took a while to work through them all. He had a fairly good view of the Pentagon attack and when I went over the following February the area round the Pentagon was bristling with anti aircraft guns and there were concrete barriers around the area near the White house.

Travelling to, from and around the States took a while because of all the not-very-random-at-all-really security checks. I eventually discovered that I kept being searched because of the bottles of whisky I was carrying which appeared as mysterious cylindrical objects on xrays.

I didn't visit New York on that trip. Could have, but didn't.