11th September 2011

9/11 ten years on. For one French woman today has especial meaning. Dening Lohez had been married just 3 months when she heard the fatal news that her new husband Jerome had perished, one of the 4 Frenchmen working in the twin towers of Manhattan. Since then she's visited several Arab countries in an effort to try to understand why they committed such an atrocity, and has since started the Jerome Lohez foundation in her husband's memory, helping young people.
I was amazed to see how this French woman, who must have been devastated, still managed to stay focused enough to travel to the Middle East to see and talk to ordinary Arab citizens.  It's clear that understanding is the key to resolving the enormous differences between West and East. Of course, in the pre-IT era, people only worried about problems near to home. Now, with the vast global network, we're daily confronted by scenes of people living completely different lives. How terrible for people suffering from perhaps malnutrition, drought, and the daily drudgery of making enough money to eat, to see people in the West living lives of apparent luxury. 
If I'd been Mayor of NY, I don't think I'd have used those millions of dollars to build that Freedom Tower. A more fitting memorial would have been to use that finance to redress some of the balance between East and West - maybe then we could hope that such a terrible thing borne of conceived injustice could never happen again.

11th September 2008

In an old cardboard box we keep at the bottom of the wardrobe I found a photo of myself taken in the 1980s. Other than the fact that I looked a lot younger, with an old-fashioned 'Afro' perm, it was the setting that gave me such a shock. I was sitting in front of a marble statue at the World Trade Centre in New York! I felt quite numb at the thought of what lay right there today. It's now 7 years since that fateful day, but the world is moving on - quite rightly so. And, after the fears of yesterday's experiments in Geneva, what else can we do? But, for the French, life is comme d'habitude. Although they are famous for the liberality of their bodies, their minds are quite another thing. In my experience, they do not like to dwell on their thoughts for fear of appearing ignorant. The French news channels seem to perpetuate this stance, not covering disasters such as 9/11 in anything like the regularity or concentration of English tv or Sky channels. No, French tv trawls across the different departements of France, giving a balanced look at what is happening across the country - sometimes lightweight, yes, but it doesn't matter. Yes, the French channels do include world events, but these do not saturate the news to the exclusion of all else. When in the UK, I try to limit myself to watching the news only once a day. Well, it's a constructive way to beat those depressive thoughts. 'The world might end?', 'a repeat of 9/11 around here?' Non merci. I'm too busy watching how to make champagne.