9/11. Where were you in that moment you learned the horrific news?

[Ron Obvious]

47. We were visiting my sister in Italy

We were sitting on her patio drinking wine, probably talking about the Champions League game that was going to be on that evening ,when her husband called and told her to turn on the TV.

It was unreal. Something from a movie - it couldn't be real. At that time they were saying that 50,000 people worked in those buildings during the day and that they might all be dead. Just imagine, roughly the entire casualty count of the entire Vietnam war lost in single day. I felt that life would never be the same again...

Over the next few days, while travelling around Rome and Florence, people from all sorts of nationalities made a point of talking to us and shaking our hands and telling us how they were with and behind us.

Although we lived 3,000 miles away from New York in Seattle, we felt like stand-ins for stricken America, and I suffered jaw cramp from the manfully determined look I felt obligated to return to those people who had come to shake our hand. Pity I'm rather lactose-intolerant to the milk of human kindness...

Just a few years later, most of the civilised world had turned against us because of the Iraq war and other excesses.

It took an exceptionally incompetent moron in the White House to turn all the goodwill we felt at that time into hostility in such a short period of time...