Where were you?

This day five years ago, i was coming back from a job interview and was calling my friend to update her. It had sounded like a teaching job with some technicians duties, but it turned out to be a technicians job, with some teaching duties. She said, "Just switch on the television a minute. There's a plane flying into a building."
We watched the plane gliding towards the towers and felt the resulting mayhem and confusion. Like everyone else, i then couldn't turn the TV off. I had been thinking of quitting my masters degree, and the programme director rang me (a minute after i put the phone down) to tell me not to leave, to take as long as i needed to finish. It was good advice, ten months later i wrote a brilliant dissertation on Sophie Calle.

I'm aware that there are tragedies and massive loss of life all over the world - and far too often; but there is something about this image that has retained it's shock value. Despite it's endless replaying, it never suffers from compassion fatigue. As well as this, this event was one which revealed one of the primary functions of blogging.

If you'd like to put the whole thing back together again, you should look at this film clip by artist Runa Islam.