9/11 MY MEMORY
I remember it being an extremely pleasant autumn day, at two that afternoon I was due to meet an extremely attractive woman called Petronella to discuss some joint training we were due to undertake, which gave the day a certain frisson. After an extremely tedious meeting in the morning I took the tube to Earls Court and in my memory became cocooned from the world for about an hour and a half.
The planning went extraordinarily smoothly, enhanced by the pleasure I was deriving from her company. I do remember that during a short break she was endlessly playing with her mobile phone. I thought she was playing some sort of game and said so, but no she was in fact text messaging, my first experience of the phenomenon.
I am not sure what time I emerged out into the afternoon, sometime around three I think. It was a fine day and I was in no hurry to get back to the office and so took a bus along the Kings Road. In those days my Job title was Clinical Services Manager and I was working for a counselling service based just around the corner from Scotland Yard. The bus moved slowly and I was enjoying the day, reflecting on my recent meeting and the flirtatiousness I was still experiencing.
I got off at Green Park and was surprised by loud announcements coming from the tube station advising passengers heading to Heathrow to check first as to whether or not their flight had been cancelled.
I walked across the park sensing that something unusual had happened. When I got back to the office I was told that two planes had crashed into the twin towers and that the Pentagon had also been attacked. My immediate reaction was of disbelief and for a moment thought that the information was surely wrong.
When the reality sunk in I experienced a complex series of emotions, horror and yet coloured by years of watching American imperialist adventures from Vietnam to South America and across the world; they had hit the Pentagon from which so much of this aggression had emanated, a taste of their own medicine? But I also knew New York, a city I loved, had spent time in the states and had trained at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I had travelled to the top of The World Trade Centre, onto the viewing platform, had made a phone call from the top in one of the specially provided booths. The thought of an assault on the city of this scale was sickening.
I was counselling until eight that night and arrived home around nine. I turned on CNN and for the first time was hit by the enormity of what had happened as I watched the towers implode. I also watched footage of the ‘jumpers’ and any residual ambivalence was gone, I was watching an act of pure evil.
That is more or less my memory of the day, but such global events throw ones immediate life into relief and I was already undergoing changes, within six months I had resigned to go travelling. My memory of the day a complex cocktail of the trivial and profound, of sexual frisson and flirting, a pleasure at being alive, enjoying my own competence and of disbelief, horror and anger, of change being in the air.
The planning went extraordinarily smoothly, enhanced by the pleasure I was deriving from her company. I do remember that during a short break she was endlessly playing with her mobile phone. I thought she was playing some sort of game and said so, but no she was in fact text messaging, my first experience of the phenomenon.
I am not sure what time I emerged out into the afternoon, sometime around three I think. It was a fine day and I was in no hurry to get back to the office and so took a bus along the Kings Road. In those days my Job title was Clinical Services Manager and I was working for a counselling service based just around the corner from Scotland Yard. The bus moved slowly and I was enjoying the day, reflecting on my recent meeting and the flirtatiousness I was still experiencing.
I got off at Green Park and was surprised by loud announcements coming from the tube station advising passengers heading to Heathrow to check first as to whether or not their flight had been cancelled.
I walked across the park sensing that something unusual had happened. When I got back to the office I was told that two planes had crashed into the twin towers and that the Pentagon had also been attacked. My immediate reaction was of disbelief and for a moment thought that the information was surely wrong.
When the reality sunk in I experienced a complex series of emotions, horror and yet coloured by years of watching American imperialist adventures from Vietnam to South America and across the world; they had hit the Pentagon from which so much of this aggression had emanated, a taste of their own medicine? But I also knew New York, a city I loved, had spent time in the states and had trained at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I had travelled to the top of The World Trade Centre, onto the viewing platform, had made a phone call from the top in one of the specially provided booths. The thought of an assault on the city of this scale was sickening.
I was counselling until eight that night and arrived home around nine. I turned on CNN and for the first time was hit by the enormity of what had happened as I watched the towers implode. I also watched footage of the ‘jumpers’ and any residual ambivalence was gone, I was watching an act of pure evil.
That is more or less my memory of the day, but such global events throw ones immediate life into relief and I was already undergoing changes, within six months I had resigned to go travelling. My memory of the day a complex cocktail of the trivial and profound, of sexual frisson and flirting, a pleasure at being alive, enjoying my own competence and of disbelief, horror and anger, of change being in the air.
