View from Battery Park, 1997

It's a couple of days late, but here's my own little personal tribute to 9/11 - an old photo of Tony and yours truly hamming it up at Battery Park, lower Manhattan, showing of course the twin World Trade Center towers, circa March 1997, a time when the world was perhaps a little more innocent, a little less cynical.

Yes I know the Photoshop merging is absolutely terrible, but hey, this was a panoramic sequence shot on a budget P&S film camera (with the yellowed negatives only scanned to digital much later).

With the benefit of 10 years of hindsight, for me, what's most tragic and sad about the entire affair, is that in every way that the events of 11 Sept 2001 was wrong, the subsequent response to it in the past decade has been even more wrong - the whole "either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" rhetoric, the invasion of Iraq, the loss and restriction of personal freedoms and liberties in the name of national security and counter-terrorism, the legitimisation of religious intolerance, the airport strip-search and full-body scans...I could go on, but I'm sure you get the picture.

By now you'd probably have seen this video - I must have heard this song a million times before, but now hearing it in the context of 9/11 gives this timeless classic a whole new level of meaning...thank you, Paul Simon, for such a dignified, nuanced rendition.

"Hear my words that I might teach you

Take my arms that I might reach you

But my words, like silent raindrops fell

and echoed in the wells of silence."