10.15am. This time 8 years ago I was coming out of a French class at my local community college in Norwalk, Connecticut, USA, when I popped into the library to get a book only to find the radio on full blast with news about two planes crashes into the World Trade Centre. We were all told to go home immediately and college would be closed until further notice. We had no television at home so I went down to the beach where we could see Manhattan and saw that the magical skyline had changed for ever. A thick black smoke was trailing into the clear blue sky – over the next week it lingered over Long Island.

A voicemail from my husband who worked in Midtown meant that he was alright although we were unable to contact each other for the rest of the day and it was impossible to contact our families in England to assure them that he was OK but fortunately the internet was still working. Like most British people who have survived attacks by the IRA, he was stoical and sat there in the office getting on with work and wondering whether his colleagues and friends in the World Trade Centre had managed to escape. I got a call from the school to see if there was anyone at home to see the kids off the school bus – the amazing statistic in Westport was that not a single child in the state school system lost a parent. One friend only learnt that her husband had survived at 1pm, he had walked down from the 60’th floor.

The attitude of the American following the attack ranged from ‘let’s nuke the lot of them’ to ‘why does everyone in the world hate us’. I pointed out to my class at the community college that Americans had been funding terrorism in Britain for years – you can imagine how popular that was – and 9/11 was certainly the demise of the IRA when American funders woke up to the fact that terrorism is the same around the world. There is always the quip that Americans go to war to learn their geography and it is very apparent from comments and from my kids’ American schooling that geography does not appear high on the curriculum. In fact, Britain also does not feature apart from being the nasty foe in the War of Independence – so much for a special relationship which certainly does not exist outside a few platitudes in Washington.

During the following weeks, heroic stories came out and not so heroic ones, one fire engine was found beneath the rubble laden with looted goods, but it was the faces and obituaries which were published in the New York Times of all those who had perished that has really stuck in my mind. I tried to read every one and it was heartbreaking as were all the pictures and requests for information put on boards around Manhattan as relatives desperately hoped that their loved ones were still alive. I went down to Ground Zero about 4 weeks after 9/11 and the acrid smell and ash still floated around with shops still left unopened and doorways full of black soot. The economy was badly hit and those who lost their jobs also lost health care too. There were frequent funerals of fire fighters at St Patrick’s Cathedral and on the train we sat next to spruced up fire fighters on their way to yet another funeral.

9/11 has changed the world, our only superpower has used the attack as a mandate to go into countries on pre-emptive strike against terrorism and sadly Blair followed as Bush’s ‘poodle’ as the New York Times called him. We have to look closely at our strategic policy and realise that we are just not that important to America but we do still have close links with the Commonwealth and Europe and perhaps should be putting more emphasis on those ties than American ones.