It was 9 a.m. and I’d just got back from the school run. I booted up my computer – the house computer – which was in the hall and logged on. Because of the time difference, my friend Kathy was online and I contacted her via yahoo messenger. Kathy lives in Florida. I had the radio on in the front room, and they broke in to the regular program with a bulletin. I took a minute to switch on the TV.

Then I got back to Kathy and said, “Turn on your TV. Now.”

“Eh?” she shot back, bemused, because I’m here in Britain and she’s there, and well, we don’t get the same programs. But that day, we did. She put on her TV and when we tuned in, the commentators were all saying they thought it was a tragic accident, because what else could it be? But not long later, ten, twenty minutes – I forget – it became clear that this was no accident.

We watched the attacks unfold, holding hands across the ocean, neither of us wanting to be alone. I kept dashing from the living room to the computer, and eventually I turned up the font size and took the keyboard, backing up so I could see the TV through the door and still see what Kathy was saying.

Then someone else came online, someone I knew from an online writing group. “I’m in the Pentagon,” he said. He was a civilian techie working there. “They got us too. We’re okay, but all the phone lines are down and we’ve been isolated. Can somebody get hold of my aunt on (he gave us an email addy and a phone number) and tell her I’m okay?” Because the computer cables were deep below the ground, they’d survived the attack intact, but the phones were down. The civilians were given permission to contact their relatives, but they weren’t allowed their cellphones at work. So we contacted his aunt. Kathy called her, I emailed her. She was a frail, old lady and very relieved to know that her nephew was okay.

We carried on watching. More people came online, and at that time, of course, the main reaction was shock. Some of my countrymen were bitter, because it was well known that Noraid, an American organisation, was funding the IRA which at the time was still bombing the mainland, or had just stopped. “Now they know what it’s like,” they said, a reaction I thought was despicable. There is no excuse, there is no reason, and the people who set these bombs are the ones at fault. Nobody else. There was also fear that this kind of attack might derail the fragile peace set up in Northern Ireland, when the factions had cautiously agreed to set aside their differences and talk. All the horror, all the dead people’s families agreed to put it behind them. Not forget—you should never forget—but try to go forward, into something new where children and adults didn’t die so often.

A few years later, all the terror and angst came back. It was the 7^th of July and I was travelling to London on a coach bus to my first RNA conference at the Royal Holloway College just south of London. But the driver got a message on the road and pulled into the nearest service station. They’d set a widescreen TV in the foyer, and people sat around watching as terrorists tried to take London apart. They’d targeted the Underground, but one of their number hadn’t made it in time, and, instead, a bus went up. So again, I watched a screen as people’s worlds fell apart. But this was a bit different. There’s a road that surrounds London, the M25. It soon became clear that constructing this road was more than a transport solution. The authorities cut London off from traffic, in or out. It was amazingly effective. They caught the perpetrators in a few days. And I went to my conference a day late. With the help of the emergency services, and ordinary people who brought out blankets and cups of tea for the victims, the mess was cleared up very quickly and the authorities set to discovering who had done this.

London was full of people determined to go about their everyday lives, because what the terrorists want above all else is to disrupt ordinary life, to make people scared, to unnerve them and so disturb the structure of society and sow doubt about the competency of the people who lead us (as if they need any help!) So the best defiance is to carry on, which was what I did. The Conference wasn’t that important. It happened every year, after all. But I was determined to go down. The bus company had given us all rain checks, although they didn’t have to, because bombs count as “acts of God” in insurance terms, so they weren’t liable. But they did. So I went down the next day, and only missed a few hours of the first lectures. So did others. I think six people in all failed to turn up. People walked miles to get to work, not because they enjoyed their jobs, but because, like me, they saw that if they panicked and lost a day’s work, the other side won.

These acts bring people together for a while. In London the underground was closed, but the buses were running. And people were talking. In London, people don’t talk. In Manchester, where I lived at the time, not chatting was the exception, but in London it’s the opposite. You can be more alone in London than in the middle of the Sahara desert. But the day I went down, people were talking about the Blitz, about the various IRA bombs and the other isolated attacks.

I’ve been in the middle of three bomb attacks. The Warrington bomb, which was an IRA attack. The Docklands bomb, another IRA attack. And what came to be known as 7/7, an Al-Quaeda attack. When you’re involved, you don’t give a damn who started it. People die, innocent people, people who might sympathise with whatever the cause du jour is. It doesn’t matter. On the ground, you don’t care. Just that someone has tried to rip your life apart. And you get angry, or at least, I do. How dare they presume to do this? What gives them the right?

All my thoughts and sympathies are with the people affected by the attack on 9/11, or as we Brits have it, 11/9. That’s the ordinary citizen and the tourists who saw it and can’t stop dreaming about it, the people in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the emergency services, the military and the people on the planes that were forced to take the fatal diversion. With courage and determination, we will win through against these extremists. Oh yes, and tea.