Let you tell me my story of that terrible day ...
I was pottering about the house when my wife called me with some urgency to come see the TV which had broken into live coverage from NYC. I stood there, hoping it was a terrible accident, but in my gut I knew that it wasn't. When the second plane appeared I knew it for a fact.
We were booked to go to NYC to visit a friend who lived in Staten Island. The tickets were in early October, a little less than a month later. We wondered if the trip was now possible. As it happened we were able to go. We spent a lot of time in Manhatten, and could see the work being done to remove and sift through the hundreds of tons of rubble and steel. The remains were still smoking.
The thing that sticks with me most from that week is how ordinary people wanted to tell their stories. Back then, just weeks afterwards, the Brits seemed to be your best friends in the world (Blair had appeared in Congress, and the US anthem had been played at the Changing of the Guard) - people responded to that and thanked us for coming and listening as they told us their experiences of that day.
I went back to NYC just a couple of years ago - the first time since 2001 - and went to the intensely moving monument which now occupies the site.
Of course, Brits were not strangers to terrorism, even then, with IRA atrocities in our recent history. (And it must be said that there was a lot of anger in the UK then about the US police tolerating people collecting for the IRA in the bars of NYC and Boston).
Nothing on the scale of NYC though. It was a wake-up call to the world.
Mike