I used to be terrified of cities.
Big old things, gloomy, dark, smoke filled monsters that would gobble you up and spit you out.
Incomprehensible transport systems that were like nerve-centres of the beast and confused and perplexed in equal measure.
People all staring at the ground or dead-eyed directly ahead but always avoiding eye contact or any kind of connection to their fellow man.
Then...
I visited this city called Edinburgh and just walked the streets until the lonely, early hours, alone with music soundtracking my treks, and now, I have a newfound appreciation and love of cities.
London unfolded its secrets every time I visited, Birmingham became a labyrinth of new thrills and joy, even Leicester (where I now live) became a maze of beauty and beguiling discovery.

Every-time I visit Birmingham or London, even to areas I have been a million times, I discover wonderful new additions or strange, unique little shards of life in places I never knew existed.
Today my girlfriend is in a nine hour exam, one that could determine her future and the entire course of her next decade of life - and I am just walking around, no plan, nowhere I need to be, and I am just breathing in the life and the world around me and I am smiling, wide and toothy.
This is a brilliant country we have. Some amazing places, some incredible sights and sounds and smells and sensations are conjured by the people and the architecture and the history and the glances of the future fast approaching.
I know things are a bit crazy right now, but whenever darkness starts to slip in, something amazing happens to drag us back to normality again, or, sometimes into a beautiful new dimension of supernormal, extraordinary brilliance.
I’m feeling positive - despite all the negativity and gloom on the TV and across the news...
I hope that we find our potential and become as great as I think we can be... not just us Brits, but humans in general.
Until we know for sure what is coming I know I have these little forays into the world around and with the friends and family who I love and these random adventures that will always be there, and forever evolve around us.

Today...
It’s going to be a brilliant day.

I promise.

There’s a magic in the air and it wants you to know it has your back.

Let it in.
Just let that magic in.

​Reflecting on the last 15 years in context to the horrific and world changing events of 9/11 is a sobering and eye-opening thing..

I was 21 years old when the planes penetrated WTC1 and WTC2.
And I was at college in Stratford Upon Avon studying Theatre Practice with 12 or 13 likeminded people – several of which are still friends to this day, several more I have not heard hide nor hair from since our final day at the school.


One such friend will be a life-long inspiration – and was the person I based Jimmy Edmunds on from the novel ONE MAND AND HIS DOGMA, my first novel.

We were starting the day as we ever were in the canteen drinking weak coffee, eating fried breakfasts, and talking amongst ourselves about the day and lessons ahead.
No idea of what was happening over the Atlantic and no idea of the epoch making situation occurring in the skies of America.

The first inkling we had that there was any issues was the chatter coming form a friend of ours who was in Heathrow of delayed flights and cancelled travel plans due to a “Small light aircraft” crashing into the WTC.
The same friends father was a pilot for British Airways and was getting incomplete updates, half assumed and half processed from colleagues on the other side of the ocean.

Bit by bit though the story was emerging.

We had taken our lunch and a stroll into town to do some shopping and look at books and music in Waterstones and HMV, when we walked past the high street electronics store, and saw on the giant 40 inch screens the true story and terror unfolding.

The first plane had sheared the tower at a skewed angle, exploding fire and debris and devastation onto the streets below.
We watched as the first few bodies started falling from the building in confused escape from the toxic fumes and fire inside, some madness in their minds driving them to suicide as a way of escaping a fate unimaginable inside the building.

The news was different on every channel, different reportage, different views and opinion; the videos all differing angles and vantage points – but the gist the same.
This was an attack, not an accident.
This was a monumental attack on freedom and the United States that would change the world.

As the reports were being made the second plane sliced a vast crease through the other tower.
And we collectively all held our breath, hands covered mouths, I vividly remember my hands retreating to my head, fingers entwined, and my mouth flapping open as I looked at the screen, my friends, the screen again, and was at an absolute loss as to what I was watching.
Like some horrible movie, but played out in real life.

It was beyond shocking.

The store quickly filled with passers by engaged and troubled by the noise and gasps and commotion inside, soon the store was full of pedestrians and staff, all stood in shock and awe – long before the same was unleashed on the desert in woefully misjudged retribution.

For a moment, amidst the evils of men, humanity shone out as people hugged and held each other, others openly wept at what they were watching.
I remember looking at a middle aged man who was crying holding his mouth, and he saying that he was there just last week.

The confusion and the fear palpable upon his face.

we went back to college, and found lessons had been called off due to the situation, and they urged us to watch the news and pay attention, as it was clear whatever was happening was the dawn of the new future.

We retreated back to our friends house, and TV on, internet up and loaded, radio chattering away in one of the bedrooms, we scoured the networks and ether for updates.

More planes were missing, others unaccounted for, others still non-responsive.
The story becoming bigger and bigger as the day went on.

Then Philadelphia, then the Pentagon, then….
Silence.

The day goes blurry and the world went murky, and I remember little more until…

That evening I am in Coventry.
My friends are playing a gig – the biggest so far of their careers – with Lost Prophets, the big buzz band of the UK scene right then – from the label VISIBLE NOISE.

The evening had been subdued and weird, the crowd shaken and distracted.
The music was amazing, and each band gave a moment and paid lip-service to the tragedy in the USA, and a single solitary voice of dissent shouted back each time

“FUCK THE USA.”

Drunk and lairy, his demonstration met with derision and hate from his fellow gig-goers, the guy unrepentant and confrontational with everyone before being asked to leave and escorted out by bouncers.

The evening ending with autographs from the Lost Prophet band members, years before any inkling of what was happening within front man Ian Watkins mind, his secrets still locked and hidden at this time – his unforgiveable sins far from public knowledge and his life on an upward trajectory, far from his pitiful fate.

We went home and slept and I cannot remember dreaming, I remember only silence and darkness.
Before the morning woke me.

I ran to the local newsagent and bought every paper I could, absorbed the views and opinions and take on the situation. Soaked in the pandemonium and fear mongering and remember clearly thinking that this was seeds of what-was-to-come.

The TV stations already building cases for the blame, already making clear statements of accusation.
The world already spinning on a tilted axis as the new dawn broke.

I honestly feel after the events of 9/11 humanity took a turn down a path we are yet to find our way out of.
The world became a more muted, darker, miserable place – and everything we have done since has just made it more  and more this way.

We are quick to accept things based on surface value and explanations by people we trust to be telling the truth, but never knowing where this truth comes from.

We no longer analyze or dig for fact, we just take it as read because the TV said so. We no longer hold the world to a high moral inspection, we accept blindly that everything is as it should be because that’s what the voices on the radio and the news says is “NORMAL”.

We lost the ability to reason on 9/11.
Instead, we became closer to sheep than people, following the easiest thread and trend, rather than blazing new trails.
accepting what our peers says is true and right, without questioning its value.
Allowing second best to be the new high standard.

We de-evolved on that day.

I remember asking a million questions, and getting a dozen answers in return.
Being hungry for information, disseminating it with friends and peers over coffee shooting wiled theories and ideas at each other, and people calling us conspiracy nuts, saying we were crazy and deluded…

But we knew better.

I don’t know what really happened that day.
Whether the “facts” we were presented were real or false, truth or lie.

Truth be told…
I am past caring what the establishment and the news and the “media” peddle by and large on any subject now.

I stopped buying newspapers soon after 9/11 as I did not like the narrative they were all selling.
I stopped reading conspiracy theories as they seemed too real, and less “conspiracy” – and I learned that the world is a three dimensional construct we observe and experience via two dimensional rationale and medium.
We miss the woods, often because of the trees, and we accept the opinion of strangers rather than finding it out ourselves – through – fear? Boredom? Ambivalence?

I do not know.

9/11 was a tragedy of so many levels that we are still trying to recover now physically, psychically and mentally.
Humanity took a battering on that day in so many ways – visible and invisible.
We will take generations to get over it.

Truth or fiction.
the world is a darker place not because of the planes, or the loss of life – as terrible and as heartbreaking as it was.

No.
It is darker because we accepted the surface of things that day rather than dig to the core.
And that is where truth lies.

I am 36 now.
I have witnessed so many things.
Beautiful, brilliant and sad.
But very few days exist in my mind as clear and concise as that day in September in 2001.

And I don’t many more will.
and that makes me sadder than anthing.