9/11...I missed the first one...

...as I was staying with a friend and we did not have access to the news. I remember being in Bochum a few days later and asking my girlfriend if I'd missed anything, surrounded as I was by lots of strange images on TV. She suggested I read the newspaper. I did and had a brief but rather strange feeling I had been transported to a paralell universe. My private life in the years since has often given me the impression that it is so. So here I am in this strange topsy-turvy world having fallen down the rabbit hole into the post 9/11 universe where values are distorted and the image of death has become our mantra. Like many I yearn for the age of innocence when moderation was the key to a civilised life. Did it ever exist or is it just a fiction of my memory? After 9/11 came Madrid then 7/7 and we entered these strange Orwellian times in which there seems so little to hold on to. Yet each one of us in her way is finding a voice. We talk, we blog, we question and together we write our own history. We yearn for peace and truth. We hope. We despair. We are alive. That is our reality.