AT SOME POINT over the next few days, many 40-somethings and upwards will do one or all of these things: they’ll emit some class of profanity, possibly affixed to the word “holy”, shake their head in sorrowful disbelief, refuse aloud to believe that it’s been twentyeffingfive years, and bustle onto social media to share this chagrin to their score of followers #neverforget.

Which would be a daft hashtag. It may be a whole quarter of a century on, but September 11, 2001 isn’t in any danger of slipping anyone’s minds. Every witness will have a story about where they were when the immolation of the twin towers happened – shocking, cinematic, reality-distorting, world-tilting, the very first time a revolution was globally televised.

And the least likely to forget were those who experienced the madness of it all close-up, in person, with their own two eyes. Including my own two eyes. Yeah, I was living there, a denizen of Manhattan, a journalist who, when the second plane and horrified realisation both struck, headed to where the story was.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

But here’s the thing. I have no photos to prove it. None taken by me, none of me at work. What I had with me that day was a notebook, pen and a set of eyeballs. Yet 25 years on, the vividness of the day, the assault on all senses, remains undimmed, all of it – the sights, the sounds, the hurricane of emotions swirling through the city, the molten heat underfoot, the choking metallic stench rising from the murdered buildings.

Obviously, obviously, there is a profusion of photographs and video footage and post-event reconstructions, reportage, books and documentaries to act as any numbers of aides-mémoire; also, it was a cataclysm of such significance and without any precedent, that events were burned indelibly into the minds of anyone in situ as they unfolded.

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But I think perhaps that there was another factor at work. I........

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