TIME PASSED

One of the problems with the mad frenzy of wit involved in the average “Twittergame” is the occasional ill-thought-out faux pas you might commit in the giddy rush to pump out the next brilliant bit of banter before someone else thinks of it.

Ah, you know… I’m sure it happens to you all the time during your conversations with real people. The thing you wish you’d never said, the momentary lapse of taste when you are trying your very best to get the people to like you even though you don’t know why.

So it was the other morning when I mistakenly made a 9/11 reference in a game about “rejected Stephen King titles”

Oh, it wasn’t anything nasty or anything like that. I made, I thought, the not unreasonable – and perhaps (I hoped) mildly amusing - leap between the “significant date” in the title of his book about the Joohn F Kennedy assassination, and that perhaps most significant date of the modern era.

I even add what I thought was the common decency to add a “too soon…?” (famously - I thought – or perhaps infamously uttered during screenings of the movie “World Trade Center” a few years ago) to it to let the readers know that I knew what they knew; That this was still a “sensitive” issue to be handled delicately and no disrespect was intended, and it’s not as if I don’t have at least a tenuous connection to the tragedy, having been a playmate of one of the British victims when I was a boy.

Anyway, there was still a perceived and virtual “sharp intake of breath” across the wibbly wobby woo, and, after being mildly admonished that it was probably always going to be “too soon”, I left it at that and went about putting my banterous ways to other, safer, uses.

But it does strike me that there is room for much philosophical debate here. There is the eternal problem of how long it ought to be before a “difficult” date becomes less so. Is it all right to write humorous history books about the events of 1066 because nearly a thousand years have passed, or to make entertainments and action-adventure films about a ship sinking after nearly a hundred…?

The events of November 22 1963 still resonate with my generation just as much as I’m sure those of December 7 1941 resonated with my parent’s generation, and the many tragedies of The Second World War were still fresh in the minds of those who fought it when the films started to be released.

Is the modern world just more sensitive to such things and less able to heal its wounds, or are we just such a “connected” society that none of us want to be the one who stands up and says that the time has come to move on and try to let it go as best we can in case they get castigated and condemned for doing so…?

After all, moving on and, to a certain extent, being able to be more flippant about the tragedies in our lives is part of the great human “coping mechanism” and it doesn’t mean that we have “forgotten” or no longer think that the price was too high - The annual gatherings at the various cenotaphs are testament to that – but at some point we do all need to be able to talk about that most wretched of days without feeling so bloody awful about the numbers.

After all, whilst September 11 2001 might just be the worst day a whole generation can remember, it will also be somebody’s birthday or anniversary, and they ought to be able to claim it back for themselves.