Ten years ago today, it was the afternoon here (hey, it still is) and I was on a bus. The bus stopped, and as I landed on the pavement, someone was saying something about something going in one side of something and not coming back out the other.
Naturally, my first thought was that it was a hedgehog that they were talking about. Hedgehogs were big on the zeitgeist, and a hedgehog sounds like just the animal to crawl under a shrub and not come out the other side, so it made perfect sense.
Well, what they say about “assume” is correct, because that wasn’t right at all. In fact, as as I soon learned, it had been that second aeroplane, startlingly caught live on the television over someone’s shoulder, gliding into the second tower. Not a hedgehog. The plane seemed to dissolve as it flew behind the building – and then you realised that it hadn’t gone behind at all. And then all that followed happened – and continues to happen.
I wish it could have been hedgehogs.