I just noticed the date today – September 11th – which has led me to stop blathering on about my ever-changing musical tastes for a while in order to remember 9/11.
Our parents’ generation always used to say that everyone knew where they were the day that Kennedy was assassinated. I guess that, now we are living in the information age, it’s perhaps not surprising that our generation already has two ‘everyone can remember where they were when …’ events.
Well at least us Brits have. The first of these was ‘everyone can remember where they were when Princess Di died (or was murdered, depending upon how big you are on conspiracy theories’).
Although I had been living in Prague for five years by this time, I was actually in the UK at the start of a week long visit. It started off with going to the wedding reception of a former assistant of mine, which was held at a hotel close to Heathrow Airport. I went along with my new Czech girlfriend (who 12 months later was to become my wife [and seven years after that, my ex-wife]).
The Sunday morning, we were in the hotel and my girlfriend had done to the bathroom where she would spend hours doing her ‘girl stuff’ as they all do. So I flipped on the TV to do a bit of channel surfing. Naturally all of the channels were in serious ‘we interrupt this broadcast’ mode. It took a few minutes to understand what had happened but, by the time my girlfriend had emerged from the bathroom, I understood the story – that Princess Di was really dead.
We were both in state of shock.
We had to check out of the hotel soon after and we drove up to see my parents out in the provinces listening to Radio One on the way. It was just playing this track over and over again:
The Aloof – One Night Stand (probably an instrumental version of it)
I imagine the panicked Programming Director just grabbed the first somber track that he could find to fill in the gaps between news updates. My girlfriend shed a tear or two and told me to turn the radio off. We made most of the journey in complete silence.
So it was a bit of a strange atmosphere when my parents met my eventual wife for the first time, but there were no long-lasting effects.
Naturally the media was full of nothing else for the next week (a decade later and the Daily Express is still talking about it). I must admit that, after a couple of days, my sadness was starting to wear a little thin. It seemed as if the entire population of the UK was in a competition to see who was most upset at her death, and I started to believe that everyone was now really starting to over-react.
The final proof of this came to me when, a few days later, Mother Theresa died too.
“Hmmmmm,” I wondered, “what are the newspaper editors going to run with tomorrow? Mother Theresa’s death or Day 5 of the aftermath of Di’s demise?”
The answer was most definitely Day 5 of the aftermath of Di’s demise. Mother Theresa seemed to just get a few paragraphs whereas Di got another dozen pages at least in all the tabloids.
This annoyed the hell out of me. Everyone was referring to Diana as a complete saint. But how did she really spend her life? It seemed as if she spent the majority of it on holiday with the occasional chauffeur driven trip for a quick photo opportunity with some AIDS victims before being whisked back away to the luxury lifestyle in the palace. Meanwhile Mother Theresa had spent practically her entire life living in shit among the slums of Calcutta. No contest.
So by the time of her funeral, I was totally bloody sick of all this nonsense. I had to be careful who I revealed this to, however, as to admit this in front of most people at the time would have had me tied to a stake and burned as a heretic.
Things were different though four years later on September 11, 2001.
I was sitting in a cafe in Prague having a Diet Coke and a smoke before my fortnightly appointment to see my dermatologist. The stress of having my company gone bankrupt and every single sodding thing n my life going wrong one after another had made me break out with a skin condition called psoriasis, which needed regular medication and check ups.
I got a call from Olda to say that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I didn’t think too much of it, thinking it was just some twat in a Cessna who pulled his joystick in the wrong direction at the wrong time. But then Olda called me again to say that it was a Boeing airliner and there was some serious shit going down.
I wanted to find out what the hell was going on and so rushed back from the doctor’s appointment. As soon as I got in the car, I tuned into the BBC World Service just as the first reports of the second plane going into the second tower came through. I spent the 10 minutes drive back home just saying “Holy fucking crap, holy fucking crap,” over and over again.
I quickly switched on the TV and then spent the rest of the day flipping between BBC News 24, Sky News and CNN watching in shock as the towers came down and all of the other images that must be deeply ingrained in everyone’s memories by now as we have all seen them so often.
I didn’t really do any work the following day (not that I did much work anyway as I was waiting for the web designers to finish off the design of my first ill-fated online venture). The email was quiet anyway as I guess most people didn’t go to work or, if they did, just sat around watching TV.
Despite my natural sarcasm and black humour, I have never underestimated the impact of 9/11 (OK, maybe I did snigger at the odd sick joke that came in the aftermath, but I am only human after all). The resulting mini-recession after the event hurt me bad – it was one of the reasons why my first online venture failed and then I couldn’t get a job later. Certainly it didn’t affect me personally like it must have done those in New York, but I am still very much aware of how it changed the world forever, particularly now that I am living in a Muslim country.
