9/11 - 5 years on

I haven't blogged for ages but with tomorrow's anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers, I wanted to publish something I wrote the day after 9/11 five years ago. And I wanted to attach this picture specifically as it was, more or less, the view downtown I had from my appartment on West 14th St when I lived in NYC in 1990. 11 years later that view was changed forever.

Anyway, here's what I wrote in 2001...

I woke early on the morning of 12 September. Anna and I were staying in an old farmhouse in the South of France, a couple of miles from Cotignac, one of those picture-book villages you think about if you’ve read A Year in Provence – all plane trees, fountains and chiming church bells.

Only the previous afternoon, we’d heard the awful news about what was happening in New York City and had spent the evening with friends trying to make sense of what we were hearing from the BBC’s World Service radio. The short wave signal came and went, almost in time with the gusts of the mistral rattling the windows and rustling fitfully through the olive trees.

I didn’t sleep well. We had only had phone calls from friends at home and the BBC correspondents to describe the scenes in the US and, when I woke at 6 or so, my first thought was to drive down to the village to get papers so I could see what I had only imagined so far.

It was chilly at 06.30 but shops were open and the cafes were already doing a brisk trade in early morning coffees for folk like me, heading for the boulangerie and paper shop. The mood in the newsagents was sombre though. I was stunned at the images I saw – orange flames blooming from the sky-scrapers and people in suits, clutching briefcases and mobile phones, but white with a covering of ash, looking like extras in some weird B-movie. Then, on every page, the picture of the jet-liner – the same type my brother flies – heading, nightmarishly, inevitably, for one of the Twin Towers.

The young man behind the counter in the paper shop seemed as shocked as I was. But there, in this tiny village, tucked under the cliffs of the Bessillon hills, he had created his own tribute to what we were seeing thousands of miles away. He told me he’d visted Manhattan some years before and had taken one of those long, panoramic-style photos of the downtown area. And there, right in the middle, was the World Trade Centre, the twin tours dominating the centre of his picture. ‘Voila’, he said, pointing out the photo sitting squarely on his till, ‘That’s a bit of history now. But that’s how I’ll remember New York.’

So, as I walked round the corner to the gloomy warmth of the village church to say a prayer for those around the world who would be affected by all that happened on Tuesday 11^th September, I realised that that his words and that small gesture of remembrance would form my abiding memory of those few days. And, for once I didn’t need the internet, wall-to-wall TV and the addiction of following a big news story hour-by-hour. It was enough to have shared a few words with a stranger in the chill of a provencal morning, had a coffee with my papers, bought my bread and gone home.