Hmm, well, the ‘crappy couple of days’ I was blithely talking about on Monday may be over, but this is something else altogether. I feel entirely useless. Friends of mine are emailing me and phoning, but I can’t tell them anything that will help any of us to comprehend what has happened. I knew the WTC pretty well – I used to live just over in NJ, and so since it was just a 10 minute ride away, I would regularly go to DJ Mondo Lucien’s Wednesday night easy listening party at the 107th floor bar. I must have been there 10 or 20 times. Also, being a foreigner here, I spend a healthy chunk of time showing tourist relatives and friends around. I first went up to the observation deck myself in 1996 as a tourist; more recently I was there just 6 weeks ago with Esther’s father. Come to think of it, on Sunday we nearly went down there to buy clothes at Century 21 (right across the street), but I was in too bad a mood, so we stayed in the village.

One of the strangest things, on reflection, is how entirely impossible it was for me to get my head around what was happening. As the second tower fell, I didn’t think about all the thousands of people who were dying at that moment – I just thought of the crumbling buildings.

I’m really not going to say much more, as others are doing so much more interestingly and meaningfully than I will be able to – see World New York, which Matt at Scrubbles featured in his weblog.