I was working in the City at the time, in the same contract job I mentioned in the "pettiest thing" thread. It came down our Bloomberg tickers first, and then everyone ran to the TVs. We were desperately trying to get the BBC News website, but it was overwhelmed.

Then we all got sent home. We were near Tower 42 and a load of other tall buildings: they were worried about a London attack.

Got back to Ealing and spent the rest of the day glued to the TV. A profoundly weird day.

I was off work sick and still living with my parents. My mum came upstairs and said I better come down and watch the TV. We thought it was an accident at first, but then the second plane hit. I remember ringing the office to tell everyone, as it was pre-smartphone and widespread internet.

I was standing in the offices of Kerrang! magazine next to the singer of Napalm Death. I had a part-time job there packing T-shirts. There were TV screens all over the place and every one of them was tuned to CNN, broadcasting the horror that was unfolding. It scared the shit out of me.

I was in America, had taken my sons to florida for a holiday.

Inside I was a bag of nerves, but had to put on a brave front for my sons.

I have never been so glad to get back home after a holiday.

Terrible scary time.

Sky News on the go, and the first plane had hit. No-one could have thought it was anything but a terrible accident. Sat glued to the TV as it unfolded... and then the second plane went in. I phoned work and said I'd be back late and filled them in, as much as possible. Pointless going back, as once I did we simply huddled round the sole computer in the building with net access and refreshed the photos of people running from the dust cloud, in utter disbelief.

I left my job (where I'd been more or less happy for eight years) within two months. I don't think I'm the only person who undertook some major reflection because of the events of that day...

I was in a car with my ex-wife driving along the A66 towards Darlington to get our newish car through its first check. I remember switching on Mark and Lard wondering what was happening, as the conversation was pretty confused and no one seemed to know what was going on.

As we came into the garage, we wandered into the showroom and saw the TV just as the second plane was hitting. I remember feeling a cold, cold feeling in the pit of my stomach: it was obvious that something of great enormity was happening, and not an accident.

We rang our parents to see if they were watching this too. It was just too incredible to contemplate that this was happening. I think for the rest of the day everyone I know was pretty dazed at it all, just gazing at the news and wondering rather fearfully what the hell was going to happen next

I'd just booked a surprise trip for the GLW and I to Washington for our wedding anniversary in December and was watching The American President to get in the mood.

When the film ended, I switched the video off and the TV came on to the BBC, where they were endlessly replaying images of the plane hitting the tower. I spent the rest of the day watching in stunned disbelief as events unfolded.

And when the reports of Washington being attacked came through, it all felt like a bad dream.

I was working for B&Q at the time and the next day there was a two-minute silence. When that happened I had to walk away from the shopfloor to the warehouse where I absolutely broke down in tears as the horror of it all finally sunk in.

I was working for a US pharmaceutical company as a Regional Sales Manager and some of my team had relatives in New York so the evening was spent making sure they could contact who they needed to. No one they were related to was affected and in a strange way the meal that evening was a weird juxtaposition of shock and relief.

Back at the hotel that evening there were lots of Americans trying to find a place to stay as all of the flights to the US from Gatwick were cancelled.

I spent most of the evening/early morning in the bar chatting to US citizens about what they thought of what would happen next. Within 12 hours the rumour had gone round that they would be bombing Kabul that night in revenge.

A strange but memorable night!

It was erie. I work for a US company who have staff at the Pentagon and also customers in the Twin Towers. I remember the news unfolding and just getting worse every time we looked on line to see the latest news. A horrible day that got worse over the subsequent days when we realised just how awful it had been.

This, on the BBC website today is very well done and worth a watch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14634600

of a job in Denmark. I got wind of the news from newspaper websites but they were soon overwhelmed making it hard to keep track of what was happening. I spent that evening, in the dark basement flat I was living in at the time, trying to follow the news from a combination of Danish TV and BBC World Service radio. I've never felt so lonely, alone and far from home, before or since.

I remember turning on the telly, woozy and my chin hitting the floor. I don't think I moved for about twelve hours.

I'd resigned and was on my way to join those 'video calling will change the world' scallywags at 3.

I recall some incredulous gossip mid morning that 'Japan has attacked America. They're at war again!'

Then all became breathtakingly clear as we all huddled around the BBC News websites all afternoon.

My leaving presentation took a very poor second place at 3pm. Everyone was stunned by the events and it was a simple five minutes of 'Well, Andy's off to pastured news, blah blah, here's a card and some gifts. Thanks for everything'. Then all hurried back to the news sites.

I was one of them. It was a memorable, strange day.

Apologies for the mistake of the small "w" towards the end of my original thread. Must preview more before posting! Hopefully Fraser may tidy up my shoddy work!

and I was the first to read the news. When the first plane hit, we all thought it was some appalling accident. When the second plane hit we all knew it was something much, much worse.

We were supposed to be working but nothing got done that afternoon. The Internet ground to a virtual standstill. The BBC website took minutes to refresh if it didn't just freeze and crash the browser. Annaova - then a major news site - was as bad. The place that did keep going all day was Popbitch. Given the substantial numbers of journalists using it - it was a proto-Twitter in some ways - it actually had the latest news snaps before they made it out via the official channels. There was a lot of misinformation. There were up to seven planes missing; Canary Wharf had been evacuated. Or hit. But it kept moving as the world lurched unwillingly into a new era.

I walked from Smithfields to Fenchurch Street to get the train home. I didn't want to be on the tube. On the platform, broadly speaking, people were either in silent contemplation or trying to make sense of it with their friends and colleagues. No one was reading fiction. There was no laddishness from the Essex city boys, no calls home to the boyfriend to say, "I'm on the train!" The Standard - then the only evening paper in London - was nearly sold out. I remember saying something inadequate to the vendor - you couldn't say nothing. Bits of their story had been retracted already. I read it all, but it didn't have anything I hadn't already read online.

I got home and met my flatmate. We exchanged stories, where we'd been etc and then I was able to see the film for the first time. Soon I'd seen it seven or eight times. We kept watching in case there was something new to learn, our impotence almost total other than trying to learn more. I phoned my patents and we said things we'd already said and repeated things we'd all heard on the television.

I didn't listen to music. It didn't even occur to me to try.

The next morning I woke up and turned on the morning news just to get the weather and they were showing footage without commentary of people running down the street screaming covered in dirt and interspersed it with buildings crashing to the ground. It was like turning on a movie half way through except you could tell it was no movie.

After what seemed a very long time but what was probably only a minute they put a banner across the screen saying, "Terrorist attack in New York."

I actually felt some relief, at least now I could begin to digest what I was watching. The relief was shortlived as the enormity of it began to sink in.

in the Army and I remembering wondering where this event would take me. That evening I went to the Madejski to watch Reading dump West Ham out of the League Cup and I recall the atmosphere in the ground feeling very strange. As it turned out it didn't take me any closer to a war zone than that but it had a huge impact on the lives of my younger colleagues

I walked into the holiday cottage, and one of my chums said "Something's happened in New York, but we don't know what". We didn't have a tv, so I walked back into the village to try and find somewhere with an internet connection. The BBC News site was down.

Eventually found a shop with the radio on, and finally found out what had happened. Completely surreal, and terrifying.

Got back to the holiday cottage, and one of the girls staying with us said "I don't know what the big fuss is about. Bloody America. If this happened in Africa, everyone would have ignored it". Strange woman.

Like many folk, we got the news in dribs from the 'net.

It's worth remembering that the younger men at the firm seriously thought "Shit, we could be called up." No-one doubted that a major war was about to kick off.

As it turned out, it was two major wars; but that's perhaps for another thread.

I had found out that the woman I thought I'd spend the rest of my life with had moved on to pastures new. I'd gone to work in a mood of deep depression, which got blacker as the day progressed - I was my own boss, and a one-man band, with no sympathetic colleagues to turn to for a friendly shoulder. Anyway, the afternoon came round, and I dealt with a client, and charged him some largish sum of cash, and made some poor remark about being sorry to spoil his day, and he came back with a comment to the effect that 'those people in the building in America that a plane has hit are having a worse one' And that's the first I knew. And like everyone else, I spent the next hours trying to find any news going, and repeatedly trying to fire up the BBC News website, which had, of course, comprehensively crashed. My own personal upset became a very insignificant thing against the enormity of what was happening across the Atlantic.

about sums up my sentiments. I was out doing calls in the West Midlands listening to my cd's in the car. I received a call from an office colleague and immediately turned on the radio. Simon Mayo was brilliant that day but very few words could adequately portray the sheer horror and fear. My daughter was 2 and I was really fearful that she was about to experience international conflict. In retrospect this was the start of World War III but it was an ideological war rather than the Nuclear Holocaust that we had been taught to expect in the 60's. The irony is that an event carried out in the name of Islam has set back the aspirations of Islam for decades.
The following day I had to collect my agent from Boston and take him for a meal - we were the only 2 customers in an Indian restaurant. It was a surreal meal - I wanted only to be in the bosom of my family and he wanted to be back home in the USA. I have never felt more frightened in my life and certainly no other event comes even close to this as being truly life-changing in my lifetime.

I won't call it terrifying because I wasn't in the Pentagon, where things must have been truly terrifying. But the experience was deeply unsettling. At my office, we watched it all unfold on television but nobody quite knew what to do. Should we keep working? Was the White House or Congress going to be next? Were there more targets? Were the schools closing early in DC and the nearby suburbs? Were we supposed to pick up our kids early?

By noon, the streets were absolute gridlock downtown. All the bridges were bumper to bumper traffic trying to get out of the city, but none of the cars seemed to be moving anywhere. It was crazy. I left my car in a parking ramp and opted to take the subway home. It was jammed with people. But everyone was riding silently, which was even creepier. Just in shock, I guess. Also, as friends and I discussed later, a lot of us were sitting there feeling trapped and wondering if there were bombs on the subway or on the bridges out of DC. Your imagination is easily carried away. I didn't ride the subway again for 5 years, which sounds ridiculous and completely irrational, but there you have it. ... Everything in the whole area closed down the next day. Schools, etc. I think all I did was watch the news for days on end.

Can't believe it's been 10 years.

...from a colleague who was off that day ('turn the fucking telly on now...') and stood, mainly open-mouthed for a while before having to get back to work.

However, having worked through the rest of the day I only got round to calling my partner from work about 6 o'clock in the evening.
Me: 'Awful day. Did you get to see much of the news coverage?'
Her: 'What are you talking about?'
She'd managed to work until 3 in the afternoon in a busy office and then pick up her daughter from school without anybody mentioning it to her! I then told her to put the TV on and listened to her reaction as she witnessed it all for the first time. Very eerie...

I was working as a telcoms engineer at the time. A group of us were sent by our company to a well-known 2G operator's site in north London doing a software upgrade, and were incommunicado from the rest of the planet going about the task - no radio, TV, t'internet at hand. Then one of us noticed that the switches we were working on were experiencing an unbelievably massive spike in calls going through them. A text subsequently arrived saying 'a plane's gone into a building in the US' - we tried to get online over 2G (at a full fat 9.6Kbps!) to get the news, to find that the likes of CNN.com had all crashed. Then one of the site staff dragged a TV downstairs from the tearoom and we got the full news of what had transpired.

Throughout the day, all equipment across the operator's GSM network were running at nearly full capacity, they'd never seen loads like it as people rang and texted their friends and family about what had happened. I'm pretty sure there's been no such scenario in terms of sheer weight of telephonic traffic since then either.

Part of the job we were doing required at midnight for all the equipment to be restarted to load the new software builds, which meant that all calls would be dropped immediately and hence no new calls would be possible for 5-10 minutes or so. Needless to say, this was cancelled - nobody wanted to create situations where someone calling the US, to check up with nearest and dearest, suddenly found their call dropped for unknown reasons.

A couple of weeks later, I was at Heathrow waiting to catch a plane for a meeting overseas and I was with one of our customers in a bar. He gets a message from his missus, and he looks at me ashen-faced and then shows me the picture he's just received - its another crashed jumbo jet in the US. It turned out it was a mechanical fault that had brought it down, but at the time we assumed the worst - the feeling of dread getting on that plane was just appalling. Needless to say, we sank a few before getting on! But the person I felt sorry for was the one Arabic-looking gent who was on the flight - despite the fact that he was wearing a very expensive looking suit and a natty briefcase, and had all the very latest business paraphenalia you could buy, he couldn't move his weight from one arsecheek to the other without intense scrutiny from everyone around him.

BR
FT

buying 'Magnification' by Yes

Listening to Simon Mayo's afternoon programme on 5Live as things gradually unfolded. I phoned friends in the USA, I phoned friends who worked in the City, but mostly I listened to the radio. There was little conversation with patients. Everyone wanted to listen to the unveiling horror.

Apart from with one chap, Mr Tod, not the crispest fiver in the wallet, who came in for an early evening appointment.

"Garn, Mr Law" he said. "You been watching the tellyvision? You've not seen nothing like it. Across in Hamerryca. This plane going into a block of flats.."

I didn't whether to laugh or cry. I agreed with him that it was quite a thing. He died of asbestosis a few months later but I will always remember him and his name for all the wrong reasons.

A boring morning on quality control. I spent lunchtime in the office, when one of the front office women came in and silently put BBC-1 on.

We sat there, shocked. About 10 minutes after the first strike, one of my colleagues said that it was remarkable how the building was still standing, and that if it had withstood that shock it would probably be alright. A few minutes after that, it collapsed.

We received a phone call from News & Current Affairs asking if we were recording. It seems that there had been a panic and nobody knew whether the footage had been recorded for re-use on the news.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but something strange happened the previous week. Reports were rife that the Queen Mother had died on Friday 7 September 2001 - so much so that the fact she went to church made it onto the front page of the tabloids on the Sunday. My friend in News told me that she and several others in the department had had their annual leave cancelled at immediate notice, something which only happens in exceptional circumstances. Consequently, News was under-manned when the attack happened the following Tuesday. What I've wondered since is whether there had been a threat the previous Friday, word got out that something was amiss, and people had simply concluded that if something had happened, it must obviously have been the Queen Mother dying? (This wasn't merely a BBC thing - I was asked separately by friends working in publishing and at Virgin Radio whether I'd heard anything.)

Some joker came into the shop and made a glib remark after the first plane had hit. Popped across the road to watch the TVs in Granada's window and along with a dozen others was dumbstruck as the second plane hit in front of our eyes. Then I went back to work. We'd just launched a new video offer and the lead title was a dirt cheap Die Hard, so I had posters of burning skyscrapers all across the store. Managed to avoid any more news before I got home and then had an overload of info about two other planes and the collapse of the towers relayed to me by the FPO.
Even in those early hours it was clear the nothing would ever be the same again.

myself, some publishers, and a would-be TV producer scheduled a meeting in my near-empty local, ostensibly to discuss turning a book I'd just written into a TV series. Unfortunately, the meeting fell apart about 10 minutes in as, ironically, we couldn't stop staring at the TV.

Around 30 minutes in, the publishers muttered something like "I wonder if they'll attack *us* next?" (they'd recently been subsumed into a Murdoch group), made their excuses and jumped into a cab.

I wandered over to the bar and addressed the sole barfly, similarly mesmerised by the tragic images of fluttering paper, and grey wraiths stumbling down the Manhattan sidewalks. "We're going to die now, aren't we?" I said. "Yes" he said. "It's the end of the world." And we clinked glasses.

An hour later, I tumbled out of the pub into a changed world.

The TV series never materialised. I totally blame Al-Qaeda.

and out of consciousness in intensive care and missed most of it.

I suspect that this accounts for most of my emotional detachment from it.

I now live and work not far from the Pentagon; my best friend could expectorate on to the building. What really brings it home to me is the personal stories of my friends who were personally impacted by it - Pentagon, or Twin Towers.

America changed that day; I'm not sure for the better.

I was at school (fourteen years old) and we weren't told anything about it; though I'm sure the staff must've known. It was, as has been said, pre-Twitter/Facebook etc so there was no way of transfering information between students. I remember getting home around 16.00 and turning on BBC1 to watch CBBC- for some reason though, the news was on. I thought nothing of it, and decided to switch to ITV to see if anything was on there. Again, it was the news. Channel 4? Same thing! At this point, it hadn't occured to me that there was a significant reason for this, and I hadn't yet processed the information that I was watching on the screen; it was only when I switched it back to BBC1 that I realised something awful at happened. By this time both towers had been hit, the world had pretty much changed forever and we'd all learnt a new word: Al-Qaeda.

I remember being appalled by the physical mass of the towers. Standing at a base corner of one of them, leaning back to stare up at the utterly inhuman scale of the thing. Not a feeling of awe, of admiration, but of being crushed, overwhelmed.

In every sense but the architectural, what happened was a terrible tragedy. For pretty much everyone.

My friends are in New York at the moment on holiday. If I ever make it to New York, I will certainly visit to the area and pay my respects. I believe there are now two water pools, where the base of the towers were, alongside the other new buildings in the area.

I saw all the news footage in the messroom at work, feeling detached through disbelief, not lack of interest, selfishly ticking off a list that told me I didn't know anyone in New York.

I started driving my train to Clitheroe and I remember staring intensely at the four tracks of railway before Salford Central Station as the penny dropped that two days earlier I'd seen my brother and sister-in-law off as they headed for the Eastern Seaboard. Had to keep my head together for three hours until I could get in touch with family.

As it turned out, my brother had been driving through Washington and saw the plane go down on the Pentagon. He'd been working near the US Embassy in Nairobi when Al Qaida hit there too.

Working for an American - New York based - bank, on a conference call with them and Brussels.

The NY people heard the first one, and the call was swiftly scrubbed. Watched the second one go in on the TV. Remember thinking to myself that I'd just watched the world change.

While nothing about that day was any good, what made it even worse for us was that we worked in the 41st floor of Canary Wharf, and that 9 of those 10 top floors all housed US banks/companies. We all felt like there was a bullseye on the side of the building. Every single plane that went past got watched with...well, trepidation doesn't feel adequate to cover it.

And no - we didn't get sent home.

..at work. News began filtering in, but we had no access to tv, only internet. As others said, the internet very quickly gummed up, and most news based sites were very quickly unavailable. The only site that had consistant access and coverage was a Manchester City message board that hd a number of US contributors who were feeding info through.

All my deadlines went by the way that afternoon, went home and played football with my (then) 1 year old. As others have said, it felt like the beginning of the end.

I still hate watching programmes about the day. It still makes me feel physically sick with fright. I have been trying my best to avoid the coverage and will doubtless need to have a media blackout this weekend. Maybe that sounds pathetic, but that's the way I feel.

I was in New York last week, and visited the site. The sheer enormity of the whole area just isn't apparant until you've been there. Over 350 firefighters lost their lives that day - thats a tenth of the whole total who died. The scale and enormity of the whole thing is staggering. A new building is in progress, but the whole area is still sealed off.

It seemed like the end of the world, thank goodness it wasn't.

had the most bizarre lead-in to 9/11 I've heard so far. On the evening of September 11th (Australian time), he went to see Glenn Tillbrook play a solo show at a small club in Fremantle, Western Australia. For reasons unknown only around 20 people turned up.

Undaunted, Glenn decided to give the faithful a little treat and took the entire audience on a musical walk through the streets of Fremantle. With Glenn out front on guitar, this ragged group wound its way through the crowded café strip, pied piper style, singing along to a selection of Squeeze hits.

After an hour or so, they returned to the club for a few more songs, after which Glenn signed autographs, pressed the flesh and posed for photos.

Still buzzing from the experience and just when he thought the evening couldn't get any stranger, my pal climbed in his car to drive home and turned on the radio...

I was about to start a full-time year at college to prepare for career change and this involved a weekly placement in churches in Runcorn. Even though college didn't start until the week after, 11 September was the date set for my first visit to meet people. An event in the morning led into lunch and then visiting a number of elderly housebound who I was to visit over the coming months. None of them had the television on. Finally finished some time after 4pm.

In a previous career I had worked for an IT company in Runcorn for 11 years and hadn't been back for several years, so I decided to visit old haunts - including 'Shopping City', which was even bleaker than it sounds. My head full of what I was getting myself into, completely ignoring the sound of Radio 4 burbling away until it suddenly clicked that PM was on and it was too soon. I tuned in to hear Eddie Mair saying, "America is closed". My mind failed to process that sentence. In the remaining two minutes of my journey I picked up something of what had happened, including reports that several other planes were thought to be still in the air en route to who knew where.

My abiding memory is of walking round a bleak windowless shopping centre, thinking that I was probably the only person in there who knew that the world had changed. The only TV shop was deserted and had a couple of TVs switched on showing cartoons. I nearly went in to tell them that if they changed the channel the shop would soon be full. It was surreal, like one of those disaster/horror movies which cuts between the 'monster' approaching, to the inside of some US shopping mall playing cheesy musak, oblivious to the impending doom.

I must have driven home with the radio on and then watched the images on TV but I don't remember any of it. All I remember is standing in a too brightly lit concrete shopping centre with a tight knot in my gut, feeling confused and sick.

We were in the middle of closing a deal that involved funders who were based in New York when the guys at the other end told us that they'd have to hang up as they'd been told to evacuate their building as a plane had hit the WTC a couple of blocks away. At the time, everyone imagined a small propellor-driven plane accidentally hitting the building (the guys in NY couldn't see the WTC from where they were). How wrong we were.

....QPR reserves beat Peterborough United 6-0.
I suspect a Peterborough player might remember the day for other reasons as he was treated on the pitch for at least ten minutes before being taken to hospital.
High powered stuff, eh?

I found out about the attack from a steward.

I came back from lunch and someone said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Centre. We were laughing about what of doofus would such a thing, thinking it was only probably a small plane gone astray.

So we put CNN on and couldn't believe what we were seeing. And then the other plane crashed into the other tower. I looked through the doors into the newsroom and it was going haywire....

of the day itself, but rather of an anniversary of it, maybe 2 or 3 years ago, when Johnnie Walker still had the Radio 2 Drivetime slot. I was en route home, he reminded us of the date, and then played The Eagles, 'New York Minute' And I listened to the words, and they seemed so apposite. Even now, I'm feeling slightly teary, thinking about it.I haven't got, and never did have, any connection with anyone involved in the 9/11 attacks, but Mr Walker certainly picked the right song for that remembrance day.

At the time the company I worked for manufactured thermal imaging cameras for the fire service and had a subsidiary business in New York so our involvement post 9/11 was very real.

However, the overwhelming memory of the day was of one of my office colleagues whose father worked in the immediate vicinity of the twin towers. As communications were swamped and fell apart she became increasingly frantic to establish contact with him, finally, I believe, receiving a call from him about 3am the following day. Seeing her fears multiply with each failed phone call or email is not something I care to repeat.

The global communications infrastructure is good and is undoubtedly better 10 years on, but when it fails you may as well be in a sealed room with only an over-active imagination for company.

..who said ""this is the start of the third world war mate" was fairly prophetic. I remember watching the event on TV with a horrified Muslim flat mate I had at the time. Along with an Australian girl, who's only reaction was to repeatedly say the word "noooooo" very loudly. But I remember mainly the realisation that were would be consequences for the events of that day.

It was my friends 19th birthday and, having done our a-levels that summer, it was only a few days before people were packing off to University. September 11th was to be an "all-dayer".

3 of us had been out for a while when, mid afternoon, more started to join us in our local Wetherspoon and someone said "a plane has crashed into the Twin Towers". I didn't know what the Twin Towers were. By 5 or 6pm we were in Yates, much drunker by now, and they were showing the news (without sound) on the big screens. It started to sink in a little more that this was something big, but reports were still unclear.

By the time I got back I'd sobered up a bit, turned the news on, started to realise the size of what had actually happened. It took a while to sink in.

so had no internet access outside the internal network. Another group in the same room were on an IT project and had full access, so we heard the news about the planes hitting the towers and then the towers collapsing in an increasingly incredulous voice from their manager.

I'd been travelling in the US when I was 18 about 10 years before, I'd been to The Towers, went up to the top, remember being in the observatory floor watching a helicopter fly below me, just the thought of that physical mass of the structure coming down was terrifying.

One of my cousins lives in Greenwich Village but found out pretty quickly that he and his family were all ok thankfully. Spent some time after work in the local Wetherspoons, the multiple screens dotted around the pub all showing the images from the scene with the PA switched on to hear the commentary rather than the usual silent Sky Sports in the background.

I remember so vividly the walk into work the next day. Everyone was silent, I could only here the sounds of footsteps and the traffic. I can't remember a single conversation, no-one on their phones. Eerily quiet.

I had got into HMV on Oxford St early doors as John Hiatts latest album "The Tiki Bar Is Open" was released that morning. I was with a client up until about 2pm and didn't know anything had happened. I got back to my car in Hammersmith, unwrapped the album and stuck it on. Just as the first chords of "Everybody Went Low" (ironic to the max) came on, my phone went and my wife told me about the first plane. I shut off the music and stuck on Radio 4 and listened to the events unfold all the way home on the M4. I had been in the WTC on a few occasions and remembered my last photo I took a couple of months previously - I had positioned my camera against the outside wall and taken a snap looking upwards. My mind raced back to that image and realised what now must be occuring at that very moment, at that very spot and went numb. I've since revisited NYC and always make a point of going to Ground Zero. I can never hear the Hiatt track again without immediately being taken back to that day.

The FPO and I were buying our 14 day 'hopper' tickets for the theme parks on the morning it happened. I don't mean to sound glib but Disneyland was an odd place to be for the next fortnight. All the American holidaymakers went home, there were no planes coming in from anywhere and everyone was just looking around at what the next target would be. As a consequence we spent the next two weeks wandering around empty theme parks like Elvis.

There had been a general election in Norway on September 10th and I switched on the TV to check some results on teletext around 2.45 pm. About 10 mins later the first text crawler appeared and I as most others at the time thought a small sightseeing plane had crashed into the tower. I was glued to the TV smoking profusely the next 16 hours.

Though I did earlier, somewhere above.

My wife and I made a trip to New York, our first, in 1999. Pure tourism - there for the shops and the sights. After a trip to the Statue of Liberty we disembarked somewhere around Battery Park and said something like, 'Now what? Look, the World Trade Centre. Do you think you can get up there for a look?'

Well, yes. You could. As we found out when we had a look round the lobby. I forget which tower we were in but we visited the 'Windows On the World' restaurant first and were suitably impressed by the truly astonishing panoramas of Manhattan and New Jersey. I took photos. Nothing special. Simple tourist snaps looking down almost vertically at the rooftops below.

Then we found the elevator that took you right up to the roof. Outside, on the top.

Truly, unforgettably frightening, even though it was perfectly safe and guard railed to above head height. The sound and feel of the wind surging past and the absence of the Manhattan hum and bustle. The view was endless. Almost into the centre of the Atlantic or so it seemed. Again I took photos though intriugingly not of of the vistas. I took close ups of the roof and the communications antenna on the opposite tower. I think because I felt so awed by the scale of them, their immensity measured against my complete vulnerability stood way up there above any human contact.

I've looked at those photos a few times since 9/11. What must have been the predicament of those poor poor souls who felt their only, their best, option was to drop from such a place and end it all?

I was enjoying a relaxed after-lunch drink when a friend burst in and told me.

"John Martyn is 53 today," he said.

"Really? He does sort of look it, though, I suppose," I replied.

At our Cardiff newspaper office we always had a TV tuned (silently) to Sky, and somebody happened to look up and see the earliest report about a plane (thought to be a light aircraft, IIRC) striking the WTC. Word spread about this terrible accident, and what were the chances of a small plane hitting that particular building, how unlucky was the pilot, etc.

A large crowd of us were gathered around when the second plane hit, and I will never forget the shock and fear we all felt. As the day went on, work ground to a halt as everybody stood in front of the TV, wondering what would happen next.

When we heard about the Pentagon and United 93, plus rumours of other planes going missing, one colleague asked, "Do you think this is the end of the world?" On any other day, we would have laughed. But not that day.

When the towers collapsed, the entire room gave a great intake of breath that I will remember to my dying day. A room full of hardened, cynical hacks just stood in total disbelief for many minutes, and many were crying.

The rest of the day was frantic, trying to pull together as much information as we could in case anybody local was involved (several were).

As I drove home, Classic FM played Albinioni's Adagio. I was so overcome by emotion that I pulled over and wept.

It's so vivid in my mind that it's impossible to believe that it's 10 years ago. Where has that time gone?

Given everything that has happened since September 2001 (invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, tens of thousands dead - most likely six figures - in the Middle East and Pakistan, terrorist attacks in Madrid and London, the reputation of the US going down the toilet in the Muslim world, all the innocent dead of whatever colour, faith, or no faith and so on and on) then it seems almost perverse to say that the world didn't actually change ten years ago. But as it turned out, it wasn't WW3 (no nukes from major nation states), the US was already involved in the Middle East and I think an argument could be made that what happened was an *intensification* of the US role as world policeman that has been going on since Pearl Harbour in December 1941 - an event that actually did change the world since it brought the US into WW2 and tooled it up militarily for the challenges that followed: the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, the fall of the USSR and the first sallies into the Gulf because of Iraq/Kuwait.
Conversely, the financial overstretch of the US, the rise of China and India, the current global financial crisis, assorted green crises that may come in the 21st century, the availability of always-on, internet-capable smartphones in Africa, China and elsewhere (pick your own hobby horse) are all developments that will change the world.
What happened on 11 September ten years ago was the brutal murder of around 3,000 people that was seen as an act of war by some well organised sociopaths. It was a terrible in every sense. It may have accelerated the demise of the US in terms of its reputation and overspending (the sheer cost of subsequent wars) but in itself, the idea that the attack on the twin towers changed the world is Anglo-American-centric i think. And that is not meant with any disrespect to the views aired above.

I was on a working holiday doing improvements to the Kennet & Avon canal with 11 strangers. We had all chosen to spend the week outdoors, in peace and quiet, getting away from the madness of the world. That day was our midweek day off, so we piled into the minibus and went to Salisbury. As we went in we chatted noisily while the minibus radio had the review of some far-fetched action movie in the background. As the day went on, we started to become aware of something happening at the edge of our knowledge. Mainly unawares still, we went to see Moulin Rouge at the cinema, and went back to the village hall we were staying in. That evening we went down the pub, aware something had happened, but not sure of the whole story. We saw the news on mute in the pub which didn't make much more sense.

The really odd thing is, as we didn't watch it unfurl live (as it seems most other people did) and didn't see the planes crash into the towers (they stopped showing it by the evening) it didn't seem real to us. We were in a bubble. We did the holiday to get away from the world - it worked too well.

At the time (in Portsmouth, not the USA). Work came to a standstill as we gathered around a TV.

What I also remember was that there was it was the Last Night of the Proms a couple of nights later with the American conductor Leonard Slatkin. It was probably the only time that the USA national anthem will bring a lump to my throat and the performance of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings brought tears to my eyes.

...the previous evening in Birmingham - listening to the events unfolding on Radio 4. It was the classical thing of 'reports coming in that a plane has crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Centre ..' etc

It seemed like a terrible accident at that point. Once returned to the office and witnessing the two towers collapsing, my overriding thought was that if this had been a 'Die Hard' film, the consensus would have been that this was typically far fetched Hollywood nonsense.

watching ITN lunchtime news just before it happened. There was a report from outside some political conference and an old man was holding up a sign to the camera saying "ban cigarettes", then there was a live report from Parliment square where some bizarre masked man started waving at the camera behind the reporter's back. It cut back to the studio and the presenter said something like, It's obviously a big day for protesters.

We were staying in an apartment at Lake Garda.

We'd had a pleasant day on the lake shore, swimming, relaxing, having a picnic lunch etc and had gone back to the apartment.

I was having a shower while my wife put CNN on. She called out to me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Centre and it had collapsed. I shouted back something like "How the hell can that happen?" imagining that a Cessna single engined plane had somehow veeered off course and managed not to avoid this massive building. I stopped showering and walked into the living room, trying to make sense of what I'd just been told. I saw the flames from the tower still standing and then I noticed the ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen "America under attack". Then one of the commentators mentioned the jumpers, at which I started to feel physically sick. I sat down and within a few minutes the second tower collapsed.

We'd been to the top of the WTC a few years before. The viewing floor had recesses actually cut into it around the edge, which allowed you to sit on the floor with your feer resting a couple of feet below on a glass floor, thus allowing you to look vertically down. It was really giddying to be able to do that. It really hit home how desperate those people must have been.

There was an article I read a couple of days ago in which the author thought it was demeaning to call the people "jumpers" as in his estimation the extreme heat was forcing them out. It's a small point but I think I agree with him. Sorry I can't recall the publication or author to provide the link.

on a business trip. Asia is 12 hours ahead of EST, so it was Tuesday evening. I had just been out for a drink with some work colleagues and got back to my hotel at about 9pm. Switched on the TV.
The first image was of smoke billowing from one of the twin towers. As the horrific reality of the terrorist attack unfolded, I sat transfixed. I remember calling my work colleagues in London. I had thought it would be too late to call my wife in New Zealand, as it was already 1am. But as the enormity of it sunk in, I realised she needed to know, and to think about how much she should convey to our children, then 6 and 4, when they woke up.
The following day, finding myself on the 60th floor of a Hong Kong skyscraper, it wasn't hard to imagine what it must have been like to look up and see passenger jet heading towards you. How could you not think about it? Was it so far-fetched, after what we had just seen? Worse, I had to catch a flight to Singapore that night. I don't normally have more than one drink on or before a flight, but on this occasion I needed several to steady the nerves.

Some people who I have met describe September the 11th as a black day for America. For me, three and a half thousand miles away in the United Kingdom, it was a brown day. Brown like the counters in my Grandmother’s kitchen which was where I first heard the news. Brown like the tea I drank as I lay down on the shaggy brown carpet, watching events unfold on my Grandmother’s brown, wood-veneered Bang & Olufsen television.

“Why is everything brown?” I said out loud.

Nobody responded.

Maybe it was because I was alone in the house. Maybe, with the childlike innocence of a 27 year old layabout, I had asked a question that could not easily be answered.

The events of that day were like a ball of brown clay. Over many years – decades even - they would be moulded by the fingers of countless documentarians, self-publicists and right wing country music stars into a succession of increasingly convoluted narratives that would fuse personal grief and suffering with propaganda, to create a self-important, voyeuristic brand of light entertainment that would inevitably become a parody of itself.

Four months later I was working on a documentary of my own. Titled Pets of 9/11 it was about a couple from North Dakota who had opened a sanctuary for animals who had lost their owners during the terrorist attacks. The first resident of The Twin Towers Home for Animals Orphaned by Acts of Terror was a dog called Conan. He was brown. I returned to the shelter a year later to find him absent. The new owners informed me that he eaten a mongoose called Charlie and shortly afterwards had been renditioned for questioning in Egypt.

I happened to switch the news on TV just as the first plane hit - I didn't often check the news.
A couple of years before 2001 my GLW and I went to New York and made arrangements to visit my daughter who was then working with JP Morgan. We agreed to meet in the top floor Window on The World bar/restaurant. There was a bit of fuss as we entered the WTC and the guards insisted that people leave their coats in the ground floor cloakroom before going up the the WOTW in the lift. Their was a fair amount of tutting on our part as the guard explained that it was a security issue. Little did we know.

I think the day before, very shortly before anyway. At work in Newcastle we were watching it all happen on the BBC website which then went down. I realised I wanted to get back to my family pretty desperately. We were then staying in rented accommodation in rural Northumberland in the middle of the foot and mouth zone, pretty apocalyptic in itself.

My two young daughters when I got back were trying to play while the TV behind them was full of flames and terror and devastation and people who didn't know what they were talking about.

I felt as my grandparents might have done hearing Chamberlain's announcement of September 1939.

IT was made much worse by having many friends in NY - one of whom was in Pine ST (a nearby downtown skyscraper) watching the planes hit and convinced her father was in one of the Towers. He wasn't - he'd been rushed onto the last subway out by police in his courtroom who then rushed over to see what they could do to help. All of them died.

I can still feel the top of my head coming loose at all this distance, I feared for my sanity and I could see it all happening so clearly. I'm a dreadful old leftie and there are so many things you could criticize about US policy before and after but its all besides the point - this was an act of unimaginable aggression out of a clear blue sky against people in a place I know and love, who had no means of defence