I was watching TV last night. A documentary was on about 9/11. It was made from all sorts of footage compiled to give a real-time account.
It’s strange. It was a horrible thing to have happened but it was also compulsive viewing.
Eight years on, its one of the questions people ask ‘Where were you when you heard about the Twin Towers?’
I was at work in Dublin, just back from lunch (which I had sneakily taken longer than I should) and was sitting down to an afternoon of inputting CD orders into the company database.
Lar, he who always had the news first, (he had a sneaky TV set up because he needed it for fixing the video recorders) went round the building informing everyone. It was about 14.15.
I immediately ran to the TV, not believing the images I was looking at on the TV.
I emailed a friend who lives in New York, wanting to make sure they were OK. I also felt the deepest guilt ever.
The day before I had sent my friend an email. I had been caught in a fire 11 months before and nearly died. I had sent an email which was almost a soul cleaning or acceptance of what happened me. I had thought this was terribly important until I saw the TV.
The horror, shock and human suffering I saw that day will never take away from what I had gone through, but it made me realise I literally was a tiny dot on the planet.
A lot of people lost their lives that day. A lot of people are still feeling the effects of September 11, none of them will ever be forgotten.