Where were you when you heard the news...

Where were you? You know what I am talking about, or you should know what I am going about.

Today is h 11^th of September. The day in 2001 when the American Twin Towers were brought down.

The images have to be indelibly engraved on so many people’s lives. 

I was standing in or lounge in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. I was having breakfast and I thought the TV was screening a movie. I remember the feeling of horror and unreality when I realised that what I was watching was in fact a news broadcast and that it was actually happening.

In the following days and weeks and months all sort soft theories were aired and the as a result the American president took the country to war. That conflict has still not been resolved. 

That disaster reminded me of another closer to home in 1979

I remember exactly where I was when the news came over the radio that a tourist plane was missing in the Antarctic. I was standing in the kitchen looking out the window into the blackness of the night. I can still see, in my mind’s eye, the pattern on the curtains.

Then the awful reality of the pictures in the newspaper and on the TV news of the horrible black scar on the pristine snowfield of Mount Erebus.

New Zealand is such a small country that almost every family had some connection with the tragedy. The man certainly had. One of his best mates was set to do another trip to The Ice on that fateful trip. But a diagnosis of cancer and a need for urgent surgery literally saved his life. He died some 20 years later.