Last night on France 3 was wall-to-wall 9/11 or, as I prefer, September 11.
It was a British documentary dubbed in French and followed by another, French programme dwelling more on the aircraft that crashed into the Pentagon after two had earlier been flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
It was a bleak reminder, with the 10th anniversary approaching this weekend, of detail and description already half forgotten by many.
I found it depressing in the extreme. There were uplifting memories of victims - the pastor talking about his sister, for example, and the pilot's widow - and numerous examples of the tireless endeavours of rescuers, but little else to make anyone feel better about the human condition.
Add to the wasted life the certain knowledge that, for some people, these events represented a day of glorious vengeance that they would love to see happen again and you see what I mean.
George W Bush is no more my idea of a perfect statesman than he is of others. But I found myself sympathising with his much-derided immediate reaction to the grotesque news whispered into his ear during a visit to a school in Florida.
His response, adopting facial expressions by turn frozen or seemingly gormless, has become easy to mock. But what exactly was he meant to do? Explode with rage, burst into tears? He might have called the school proceedings to a halt, but there was a certain dignity in seeing them through and, later, insisting against all advice that his place was not in some secure Nebraska bunker but back at the White House.
There was also, in the second documentary, a sequence dealing with the theories, which I find preposterous, of the French writer Thierry Meyssan, who first published a book claiming the attacks were organised by military interests intent on imposing some sort of martial law in the US and then another arguing that the Pentagon was struck not by a Boeing jet but by a missile.
It has become a cliche of momentous episodes of history that we never forget where we were when we discovered what has occurred.
I was watching a double A-film feature at the Essoldo in Bishop Auckland, Co Durham when cinema-goers were informed by the management that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I learned of the death of Marilyn Monroe one morning in a bed and breakfast establishment during a childhood family holiday in Great Yarmouth. A friend knocked on the bedroom door in North Yorkshire with a cup of tea and the following statement, remembered verbatim: "Princess Diana and Dodi have been killed in a car crash in Paris while being chased by paparazzi."
September 11? I had just been discharged from hospital after a minor operation and stopped to have what little hair I have cut by a barber at the end of our street in London. He had Channel 5 on; we saw footage of the first plane into the World Trade Center after the event, and then the second as it happened.
Nothing remarkable about that experience of September 11 2001. But what I shall always remember is the reaction of the hairdresser when, a little while after the second tower was hit, the presenter summarised the news mentioning an "apparent terrorist attack". He was indignant: "How can they know? How can they say it's terrorism?"
It was, I suppose, a sort of kneejerk anti-media thought on his part. He was entirely resistant to my attempts to explain that while one such incident - at a location that had already been the target of terrorist activity - could indeed be an accident, it was beyond belief that the second could be accidental, too.
I wonder if his memory matches mine.
* September 11th - the Memorial Edition, is a box set of DVDs available at the Salut! Amazon link by clicking here
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