Already the re-living and revision and reflection has begun. There was a sad report on Newsnight about ‘long-term’ casualties in New York, those left chronically debilitated or worse by working in the toxic dust around Ground Zero in the months following the attack. Pankaj Mishra’s authoritative overview in the Guardian – Our own, low, dishonest decade – provides among other things a real sense of the appalling human cost world-wide. As the 10th anniversary draws ever closer, the world media and the blogosphere will be filled by those with significant experiences of that day.

So I’ll get mine – which are humdrum, thankfully – out of the way now.

We were blissfully unaware of events until our younger son came home from his first day at nursery. He switched on the TV and instead of Bob the Builder got live, silent coverage of a smoke-cloud. It took a while to work out what was going on, until the BBC went ‘back to the studio’ and then replayed the last spiteful turn of the second plane over and over again.

Thereafter we kept the TV and Radio 5 Live on for the rest of the day. I don’t know how many times we stared at replays of the towers collapsing into themselves.

Next morning I stood in the back garden and wondered at the silence and – though I was probably imagining this – a clearer sky. We lived in Battersea then and the planes passed overhead towards or away from Heathrow. But not that morning. The children’s routines carried on as normal, but I kept the radio on all day. At times 5 Live simply relayed live broadcasts from one the New York stations. In between speculation about further attacks, the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden (or Dubya, for that matter) and the first of Rudy Giuliani’s briefings, we heard the Coldstreams play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ at the Changing of the Guard, by order of the Queen.

My eldest brought a friend home with him from school. They built towers with wooden bricks and knocked them down with toy aeroplanes. This palled quickly because of the amount of time it took to rebuild the towers before crashing into them again. Next time I looked into the bedroom they’d built the Pentagon instead, which could be put together again easily and posed the additional challenge of finding the precise angle at which to skim the small metal planes across the carpet. Like everyone else, they were trying to make sense of things.

At the weekend they changed the programme for The Last Night of the Proms. Instead of the usual musical Britfest of the second half, Leonard Slatkin conducted Samuel Barber’s Adagio. Fair enough. The evening finished with the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth (Ode to Joy and all that), envisaged as an act of universal solidarity and Western cultural defiance. Looking back, this strikes me as melodramatic, but it didn’t then. These were very strange times.

Anthrax and radio days

The planes returned to the skies. Buckingham Palace, Canary Wharf, Centrepoint and the Nat West tower remained intact. Attention turned to other potential forms of terrorist attack: suitcase ‘dirty-bombs’ (survival chances 1 in 3 for Londoners); Sarin gas and anthrax. I’m an anxious soul and I’m not proud to confess that for a while I bought into every type of fear and paranoia going, to the extent that I wondered quietly if we should pack off our children (7, 3 and 6 months old) to live with their granny in Northern Ireland for a while. But even I couldn’t sustain that level of panic forever. I stopped watching the news on TV after a grim-faced Michael Buerk read the evening bulletin with a giant, tabloid ANTHRAX behind him and started listening to The World Tonight instead, which assessed a still frightening and volatile world in a more measured, intelligent and rational way. And I started listening to Radio 3 in the mornings, reasoning that we weren’t under immediate threat – so long as the music played.

KEEP BUGGERING ON

This is my wife’s favourite phrase in times of stress, and was much loved by Churchill. The summer holidays are almost over: at this end best described as ‘low-key’. This brings with it a profound sense of paternal failure and paralysing moments of pre-autumn gloom. But this is a luxury. ‘Back to school’ is in the air and the kids have all got challenges this year (my daughter starts Year 6, middle son is working towards an early GCSE and my eldest is in A-Level and UCAS year.) My wife is filming at the moment. And, complete with ‘new-term’ haircut, I’m back to school too. I’ve found my ‘new voices’ stories and I’m getting ready to record them. And there are future projects to plan for too – which until recently didn’t seem likely.

Nothing for it.

KBO.