9/11 five years on
I was in hospital watching daytime telly, as you do, when they stopped broadcasting whatever antiques show it was, and started to run a live feed from New York. Not two days before I’d had a biopsy for suspected bone cancer, and was fresh with the relief that it was only a bone infection. All day, the nurses and orderlies kept stopping by, hovering in the centre of the four-bed ward to watch the news. At one point I was taken away and given gas and air while they inserted a line into my chest for intravenous antibiotics, having exhausted all the veins in my hands and arms. Coming back, I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating or not - I’ve never had a particularly good reaction to anaesthetic.
I don’t remember any of the newspaper headlines from the next day, although I’ve seen them on the internet since, as by the time the newspaper man pushed his trolley into my ward, everything had been bought apart from the books of crossword puzzles.
An extended recovery period at home, visited daily by the district nurse, gave me plenty of time to watch the coverage as shock gave way to human tragedy, and human tragedy to the hunt for those responsible.
An acquaintance of mine, now a civil servant at DfES, wrote to the Guardian about how it had become fashionable to speak of solidarity again following the attacks.
I didn’t grow up in a political family. I barely remember the Berlin Wall coming down, and had no idea of its significance. I didn’t see Nelson Mandela walk free. But I was 21, and 9/11 happened in real time in front of me. I don’t really remember what politics was like before it.
I remember the Berlin Wall going up!
Maybe that is what this is all about.Now that the cold war is over the conservatives need something to replace the reds under the beds-Muslim bogey men.
You big fat ugly lesbian you only care about your fellow rug munchers as far as you are concerned the rest of us can go to hell. You are the lesbian worlds answer to Bin Laden, except you have a bigger beard.
Quick question - how can you get the grammar right in the second part of your comment but miss out all punctuation in the first?
Jo - he didn’t get the grammar right in any part of that comment. And I question my girlfriend challenging the homophobic troll on his *punctuation*…
Alright, alright, I missed an apostrophe. I bow down and grovel before your bearded greatness…
Fascinating the vocabulary one learns from the halfwitted.
OK Sayeed bogey man-petite,beautiful,Chinese lesbians for you!
And as for the Munchies,they came out four years before the Berlin Wall went up.Would they be better if Cadbury made them?