NOT FORGOTTEN

I really wasn’t going to write about this today, after all ten years on, what on earth can my few thoughts add to the multitude of words that have been written about that brutal day and the bloody aftermath? The raw sense of loss and the pain still felt by so many families that I can’t even begin to imagine or understand isn’t something that I have the right to comment upon, other than to simply try and add my sympathies, but I can acknowledge that the shockwave of that terrible day did ripple and reverberate around the world and even touched me in a few small ways, so far away from it all in this insignificant speck on the map.

I can still recall the shock of it all as it unfolded, safe in my own office a billion miles away from it all, even now. Ten years ago, people as low as I was in the corporate food chain were not to be trusted and were not granted access to this newfangled Internet at work, but the news filtered down to us pretty quickly. The radio, permanently set on Radio 1 at a barely audible level gave us the first inkling that there’d been an accident with an aircraft in New York in that “What did he just say?” kind of a way, and, as the day progressed, all hell broke loose and various groups of my colleagues would gather in the offices of those who were more web-connected and cluster around their machines for more information, spouting their own ill-informed opinions until it started to sink in that this was an actual tragedy and not some kind of a game, and this kept on until the news sites started “crashing” (unfortunate word) from too many “hits” (again… it’s at times like these you realise how aggressive all our web terminology seems to be…).

Pretty quickly we (broadly) knew what was going on and, even here, things started to grind to a halt as the strangeness of a very strange day started to sink in. The rest of the working day passed fairly slowly and there was little else to talk about, so that’s what we did, apart from when a stunned silence was the preferred option.

There was quite a lot of that, too.

Once I got home I was as guilty as anyone of hogging the TV set and watching the tale of the day’s events unfold again and again and again. Retrospective articles like to tell us now that we’ve all forgotten that a third building fell, or the other flights, but some of us haven’t. Some of us remember them quite clearly. In fact, some of us remember it all too clearly and the ten years of documentaries since, both sensational and banal, have done little to erase the vivid pictures that we experienced that day. We did see the horrific images of the “falling man” although it seems that it’s more poetic to say these things were never shown at the time, but they were, and we were sickened and horrified enough by them at the time.

I went out and bought the papers. This is what I do. I devour the news when these thing happen, trying, I suppose, to understand it, make some sense of it all, figure it out, no matter how unfathomable it might be. I may even have set a few of those newspapers aside somewhere in an attempt to try and keep a hold on my own sense of the horror of it all, keep a tangible grip on how I felt right then, rather than with the benefit of hindsight and the smoothing process of the passage of time. I’m not with the conspiracy theorists who’ve burrowed their way out of the woodwork since. When it comes to conspiracies, I’m an “Occam’s Razor” kind of a guy. I believe that the simplest solution is usually what really happened.

I wasn’t personally involved with any of these events, apart from my experience of the news as it unfolded and my own sense of horror and disgust at the actions of my fellow human beings. A colleague had stood atop one of the towers on a relatively recent holiday, and he was grateful that he hadn’t been there on that day, and I had previously mentioned that it might be a nice thing to do if I was ever in New York, but suspected that the height might put me off. Another of life’s opportunities lost forever, but the smallest of small things when you consider the greater picture. We had to attend security meetings ourselves a couple of times over the following days because our company had American links, and another colleague got stranded by the no-fly zone for a few days, but all-in-all, that was my only personal involvement in the events of that terrible day, and I can only be thankful for that. Later on, we had to remove some of the buildings from a cityscape graphic that we’d been working on because we’d based the image on the New York skyline and it was no longer deemed appropriate, but, for us, life moved on, the world turned and things got back to “normal”, if you can consider anything since to be “normal” of course.

Sometimes I think that the world’s never going to be normal again.

A few years later, it turned out that those events so far away did manage to touch my life, ever so slightly, even in a faraway place like this is. A young lad I sort of knew, who grew up on the same street as me, who was about the same age, and with whom I used to play when I was very, very young, apparently (although I don’t remember it at all) was a victim. He worked on floor 93 of the south tower. I only found out years later because this was someone I had had no real contact with, but my mother still knew his mother and mentioned it one evening over something as banal as a cup of tea.

I often wonder how excited he must have felt to get an opportunity to work in New York City and let loose the chains of England to live in pastures new. I wonder how much that feeling of happiness and sense of good fortune must have motivated him every day as he got into that elevator ready to change the world. Most of all I wonder how any of those people truly felt when the simple act of going to work in the morning made them victims of one of the biggest acts of mass murder the world has ever seen.

We need to remember the events of that heartbreaking day, no matter how hard it might be, to ensure that those ordinary people just doing their jobs are never forgotten.