Read on Twitter
On 9/11/2001 I was working at the Guardian. I got back from lunch and bumped into my boss’s boss - a slick-haired dude who smoked 90 a day in the privacy of his own office - as I was getting in the lift. He and his companion were talking about “the plane crash” in NYC...
Bossman talked about Windows On The World. He’d been, of course. I hadn’t. I was 20 and hadn’t been to New York. We got back to our bit of the floor. Everyone was gathered around a TV, talking about it.
Minutes later we watched the plane crash into the second tower live on TV. Suddenly everything changed. Something bad was happening, but no one knew what. But it was definitely news.
But I didn’t work in news, so my work was unimportant. The afternoon was torn between posting on an Internet forum I frequented at the time and reading headlines coming in on the wires.
The wires were a kind of closed-network 2001 Twitter full of unverified headlines and scurrilous celebrity gossip not suitable for publication. At one point I remember reading about 90 planes unaccounted for in US airspace.
No one had a clue WTF was happening. We’re we at war? Mid afternoon city employers started sending people home, fearful there’d be something in the UK. Or maybe just aware no one was working anyway.
Around 4pm I left and went to Sussex to meet a friend who was leaving on a round the world trip the next morning. Because we’re British we went to the pub, where everyone sat shellshocked and/or crying.
We all knew things would never be the same again. But in the short term they were. Things got back to normal - for us. And yet in less visible ways the world was about to change for the worse for thousands of people a long way away.
And somehow, what I watched unfold on TV in a city I’d never visited ultimately took me thousands of miles east to another city I’d never visited changed my life forever, ten years later.
I’d not really drawn the parallel between these two bits of my life before. But it’s there, for sure.
