365 days ago...

I was sitting right here, where I'm sitting now. I don't remember if there had been any support calls during lunchtime, but I was whiling away the end of the lunch hour browsing around various sites. I dropped in on Popbitch, as it is always good for a laugh, and I vaguely know a couple of people who post on there. There was a picture of one of the World Trade Centre towers with a hole in it, headlined 'Who would do this?' I almost dismissed it as a Photoshopped hoax, but just in case, called across the room to see if anyone had any news services open. The BBC were, as they tend to be, being careful about checking facts, and had only a couple of lines in the ticker about an 'incident'. We found a report on CNN complete with the picture I had just seen, and there was a debate about what kind of aircraft it was, and how such an accident could happen. The longer I looked, I gradually realised that the scale was all wrong - this was a large aircraft. I kept trying to work out just how wide the towers were, and what size of impact could make such a large hole. I was in the middle of recounting the tale of the B-17 (I think) which impacted the Empire State at the end of the war, when I refreshed the Popbitch page, and saw the first report of another impact. I shouted out "someone switch on the television, I think this is no accident"

There was a small television set in the meeting room across the corridor; the room which we knocked down earlier this year, and there was the BBC, showing clearly the two towers, both in flames. Still something wouldn't quite sink in. Then the first video image of the second impact appeared:
, as I remember it, with no warning - just what appeared at first to be another view of the same scene and a sudden, sickening realisation of just what we were seeing. Then reality just suspended itself for a while. I came back to my desk - there's only so many times you can watch people die - and with each refresh of the screen, the rumours got more and more outlandish; dozens of hijacked aircraft; several in Europe; a bomb in Washington; a plane crash in Washington; they've hit the Pentagon...

The whole thing rapidly overtook any conceivable rumour. One of my colleagues came back from the TV room, visibly shaken: "One of the towers has just collapsed" I nodded, unable to even process the sentence. There seemed to be no urgency to go in there and see for myself. Instead, I found some sort of calm detachment from things, trying to carry on working while in truth continually refreshing the messageboard - a lot of the posters on there work in the media, and they were posting whatever feeds they were getting, without any moderation - there was a lot of noise, but there was also a picture visible through it - that there were only 4 aircraft, that they were all accounted for in one way or another, and that nothing would quite ever be as it was before. I did eventually make myself go and watch the images: there was clearly going to be no way of escaping them, in any case, and I gradually came to accept that what I was seeing was real. People were really dying, right there in front of me, and there was nothing I or anyone else could do aout it.

About 4:30, I gave up the pretence, and went home to hug my children. Zoë had just picked them up from Nursery, and her car had pulled in in front of mine. "Tell me you've seen the news," I gasped as I jumped out of the car. She nodded, much to my relief - I hadn't considered until that moment that I might have to tell anyone about it. We briefly debated what and how to tell the boys, but in the end, the TV went on, and we all watched together. Cameron was not yet 4, and he couldn't really grasp what had happened. "Was it an accident, Daddy?" "Yes" "Will it be alright again?" How do you answer that - I had no precedent for this; no-one had. We packed them off to bed as soon as we could, and in between watching the pictures numbly, discussed how we were supposed to bring children up when this kind of thing can happen. But a year later, we're still here, we're still bringing them up as best we can, and I'm still sitting here, typing into this machine. Just as I was 365 days ago, at almost exactly this time...