September 11th 2001

So there it goes.

The sun has set on the 10 year anniversary of those events that have come to be known collectively as ‘9/11.’

I wasn’t there. I didn’t lose anyone I loved.

If it wasn’t so political, it wouldn’t really be any of my business.

But it is nonetheless an event in my life. Rightly or wrongly.

At the time, I didn’t know anything of America outside of popular culture and a bit of Enlightenment history. I didn’t really know what the World Trade Centre was.

I, like most of the world, was a spectator that day.

And I had an immature, student-view of the whole thing.

My contemporary history had never been great. If anything, it seemed to me like the little guy had hit back. You can’t go round treating people like the USA had been doing and expect them to lie down.

(It was only with hindsight that I could see 9/11 as it really was: a vile but brilliant act of defiance by a group of people who could never win a foot war, but knew the historical importance of symbolism.)

But that didn’t make it any less awful. Those people, jumping. The feelings of empathy.

However, even then, it wasn’t real heartbreak. Not like you’d actually lost someone you loved.

If you were a spectator it was different. It was, more than anything else, a really fucking massive event.

They hadn’t been all that forthcoming in my life up until then.

The first time I was exposed to anything like it was the Challenger disaster in 1986. Our primary school had let us watch the live broadcast. We saw the space shuttle take off and we saw it burst into a bunch of ugly, chaotic, orange patterns in the night sky and the spectacle was over. The TV was turned off. We didn’t know what to say. “Was that supposed to happen?” We were kids. An adult told us the astronauts were dead. It seemed a bit sad. Like E.T (only not nearly that sad).

The Hillsbrough Disaster in 1989 was the next one. I watched the scenes in my parents’ living room after coming back from playing rugby. But, in truth, I was more worried about the upcoming FA cup final. Everton had beaten Norwich in the other semi. “They aren’t going to cancel the final are they?”

It couldn’t really bring myself to care about the deaths. That’s how a 12 year old boy thinks. Too happy to be sad.

Then it was Diana. 1995. Older. Working a bar in Edinburgh. Didn’t give a shit. My mum died the year before and no-one gave a fuck. Balls to Diana. One person, it happens every day. I was too busy thinking about which of the girls I was working with I was going to try and score with. But I still remember the news like it was yesterday.

And then, ten years ago today, some psychopaths flew two planes into the twin towers.

An event like the others but much, much bigger.

I was older, but I still felt no personal loss. How could I?

(Many faked grief. Who outside of family members and friends of the dead, New Yorkers, or patriotic Americans could have felt genuine loss? Most people were just rubber-necking a traffic accident and feigning concern)

I was too interested in the poltics to feel what is honestly called ‘grief.’ The discussions were interesting and informative. The news was too good.

(For a kid from the countryside, this was a TV event set in the land of Hollywood. It was gripping viewing. I had been conditioned to enjoy this kind of thing)

((During the London riots, the Northerers on my facebook were settling in with a beer to watch London burn on TV while we in the capital shat ourselves. Then the trouble started up there. And it suddlenly seemed to matter to them. No more jokes. News vs Real Events))

Today, I have fond memories of September 11th 2001. It’s one of those exceptional dates in history where you can remember what you were doing.

It’s a kind of existential safe-box.

The boomers had the Kennedy assasination. We had 9/11.

I remember the surroundings. I remember the faces, the names and the personalities of the people in that moment. And thanks to 9/11 I probably always will.

This was a great year in my life. It was my first job as a copywriter. I was in a big agency. I was making friends. I was learning from adults other than teachers.

It’s nice to remember. You know, really remember.

Generally, life moves on. We move on. We forget.

But big events are different. They paint an indelible picture of a moment-in-time in our consciousness.

“Where were you when you heard about 9/11?”

Me? I was surrounded by brilliant people at a brilliant time. I remember hearing the collection of sounds “all kai eed ahh” from my unfathomably intelligent boss (only the most assiduous follower of contemporary events knew who they were at the time). I remember an email from a senior-management moron saying how we could all go home in case the next attack was on Coca Cola’s offices in the Hammersmith Broadway (oh how we love to make misery our own).

I remember it all perfectly – such was the imprint of the terrible events that had happened stateside.

It is strange that I owe such a pristine recollection to such an unspeakable disaster. But it’s the same with Challenger. The same with Hillsborough. The same with Diana.

These terrible events enable us to remember where we were on a single day in history – and that is something quite special.

Now.

My heart goes out to anyone for whom today is a day of true personal sadness. I understand grief and I hope your private moments of mourning today have taken you a little closer to closure

I also appreciate, I suppose, the minute’s silences around the UK’s football grounds for a tragedy that happened in another country. I can just about respect the facebook updates of condolences that won’t be read by anyone who was affected. I’ve nothing against these, what would you call them? Prayers? They are well-meaning and uplifting acts of human behaviour.

But I was a spectator to those events.

And the truth is that spectators enjoy terrible news events. We lap them up.

Wars. Riots. Disasters… It doesn’t matter who gets hurt.

Unless, of course, it is ourselves.

You know.

Then it’s different.

Murder Most Trivial

Of all the crimes man can commit, the most heinous of all is unquestionably murder.

This is backed up by the severity of the sentence it carries: life imprisonment or the death penalty.

The victims of murder are not just the dead, but also the living the dead leave behind. The former pay with their lives, while the latter are left to mourn their loved ones with unimaginable bitterness at the fact that the loss came at the hand of another person (the ultimate in defeat).

It’s surely something that stays with you every day for the rest of your life, such is the absence of any kind of adequate closure.

So when you take all that into account, you’d think we might take it a little more … well … seriously

What I mean is this.

Dr. Mark Sloan is the protagonist in the show ‘Diagnosis Murder’. He works in a hospital and, as a sideline, likes to solve multiple murders with his son, Steve, who happens to be a police detective. I suppose you could say solving murders is Dr Sloan’s hobby. Someone gets killed and then Dr. Sloan, in between being doing his surgical work, solves the case. Something for which I presume the shellshocked living relatives are enormously grateful.

This light-hearted and badly-produced show ran for 8 years on CBS.

This mesmeric maltese-looking chap is ‘Detective’ Adrian Monk. He has OCD and the comic corollary of his condition is the uncanny knack of spotting details that can help solve murder cases. He’s not even a homicide detective any more. But murder seems to follow him wherever he goes. When he goes on holiday, there’s a murder. When he goes to the bank, there’s a murder. Even his wife was murdered. And in his own bumbling way Monk manages to solve all of them.

The final episode of this light-hearted murder comedy, in which Adrian solves the murder of his wife, holds the record for the most watched scripted drama episode in cable television history.

Watch your back, brutal killers of the innocent. It’s an old lady with a magnifying glass (essential equipment in all serious investigations). And she’s onto you. Jessica Fletcher is a novelist who also has a sideline interest in solving gruesome and tragic murders. She is co-opted by the police to … well, by now you get the picture.

Jessica’s trashy little show ‘Murder, she wrote’ ran to 12 seasons on US TV.

Here’s a fictional colonel with a colorful surname and a conical constitution. He’s a character in the popular children’s board game about murder.

We’ve all played it.

You see this pattern of glibness emerging?

Is it not a little strange that the worst crime of all, with the most severe sentences, which destroys lives in the most horrific ways … is it not strange that this crime should be treated in such a trivial way in popular culture?

To test this absurdity, maybe we could try subsituting murder with a few crimes which carry a lesser penalty of law.

Can I for a moment suggest we create a board game about child abuse? I dunno, rather than ‘Cluedo’ we could call it ‘Paedo’.

Was it Reverend Purple in the library? Or Stepfather Pink in the bedroom?

Or a TV show called ‘It looks like Rape, Doctor’, in which a comical ophthalmologist with dyslexia makes good his troubles with the written word to think laterally about cases in which women have been sexually assaulted. It will be badly acted, scripted and produced. But it’s targetted mainly at a daytime demographic, so it’s fine, right?

Is it likely that the boardgame would be a success across generations? Or the TV show would run for 8 seasons or so?

I imagine it’s more likely that people would think I was a disgusting and twisted fuck and tell me to get out of their office at the commissioning stage.

But murder?

Murder’s trashy and fun.

Unless, you know, you happen to be one of the victims of the crime and have to be reminded of it every day by the lowest representations of the tragedy you could possibly imagine.

Nothing So Childish

“Daddy, look!”

Urged the wide-eyed little boy to the man in the Deportivo La Coruña shirt as we sat in the coffee shop at the airport.

The wide-eyed little boy could have been no older than four. The man in the Deportivo La Coruña shirt maybe 30.

The wide-eyed little boy had finished a drawing. Standard abstract toddler stuff. Looked to the nosy man sat at the adjoining table like it was maybe a house set against a blue sky. A mess of colours and squiggles. Now it was complete.

The man in the Deportivo La Coruña shirt just grunted and carried on reading his newspaper.

“Darling, look what he’s done.”

Nagged the pretty wife to reinforce the appeal of the wide-eyed little boy to the man in the Deportivo La Coruña shirt.

“Not now. I’m reading the paper.”

And that was that. The man in the Deportivo La Coruña shirt had spoken.

He was a grown up. It was quite clear that he had no time for anything so childish. He was reading the paper and didn’t want to be distracted by something as immature and meaningless as a wide-eyed little boy’s drawing.

“And there’s nothing wrong with that,” thought the nosy man sat at the adjoining table. “It is correct and appropriate that when a man reaches a certain age he no longer engages in childish pursuits and focuses his efforts on more adult and serious matters.”

Deportivo La Coruña:
National Titles
La Liga
Winners: 1999-00
Copa del Rey
Winners: 1995, 2002
Supercopa de España
Winners: 1995, 2000, 2002
Segunda División
Winners: 1939-40, 1952-53, 1961-62, 1963–64, 1965–66, 1967–68
Tercera División
Winners: 1974-75
International titles
UEFA Intertoto Cup:
Winners: 2008