The World Has Changed and Left Me Here
11 September, 2011
On my way to the supermarket to fulfil my late-night 21st century consumerist desires I listened to Radio 5’s retrospective broadcast of their contemporary reporting of 9/11. Their New York correspondent Stephen Evans was recalling his experiences on the day, and the programme featured archive recordings of Evans being asked live by Simon Mayo if he could confirm whether a plane had crashed into the North tower. He didn’t know for certain, he’d said. Looking back ten years later he commented the attack made him realise that journalism had changed when London knew more about what was happening in New York than he did, on the ground in the city.
The radio was my companion on the longer but less travelled back road to the shop. It circuits the shoulders of the strath and back down the other side and I’d taken it mainly because the moon, hanging full and low in the sky, bewitched me. From the road’s highest point you can see the whole of the Clyde valley, street-lights twinkling, with the airport and the Campsie Fells beyond in the distance. I pulled up here, where the routes of the railway line and road are at their closest, got out and stood on the road, looking at the moon and the cityscape, feeling the win buffet my hair. Hurricane Katia is supposed to be heading the way of the UK and I wondered if this was the first signs of the oncoming storm.
I found myself thinking about the Glasgow of my childhood, the words of the BBC correspondent reverberating in my mind. Where I was currently standing was a space almost untouched by time. It’s remained almost unaffected by progress, green belt encroachment, economics, global warfare…the location and view is almost exactly the same as it was 25 years ago. For all intents and purposes, standing in that place is a form of time travel. I can connect with the Jay whose age was measured in single figures and remember how mysterious the world used to appear to me. My life has changed immeasurably over the last ten years, but that’s not due to 9/11. The attacks on New York City instead form my generation’s ‘Kennedy’ moment, a singular point in time where we will all remember where we were when we first discovered the news. For what it’s worth, I was preparing to return to university for my second year, and on the Tuesday in question I was collecting my gran’s shopping for her. She phoned to tell me “a plane has crashed, and the World Trade Centre is on fire”. I didn’t realise the two were connected at the time.
The more we know, the less we understand. I know little and understand less. This never used to be a problem when I was young. A driving licence, the internet and years of painful experience have stripped this city (and life) of its mystery, leaving me cynical and emotionally withdrawn. I left here at 20 to go to university; now eleven years later my peers are all married or parents and I’m stuck in a satellite town of a satellite town that doesn’t remember me.
But right here, right now, I recall feelings and sensations. Being able to just make out the floodlights of the old Hampden from the living room of my gran’s council flat. The abrasiveness of my father’s five o’clock shadow whenever he hugged me. Having a bedtime to be up past. Rusting street lamps and grass growing between kerbstones in parts of the city I didn’t have the foresight to learn the names of. The dull green glow of a Ford Capri’s internal illumination. Listening to longwave Francophone radio transmissions on my personal stereo under my bedclothes in a house without double glazing or central heating.
I long for a simpler time because I mourn the loss of my innocence. I can drive to the gaudily-illuminated supermarket at 9pm on a Saturday night and browse Twitter on my smart phone while I’m selecting my trans fat loaded items, but I know I can’t afford to buy too much because I have a mobile phone bill to pay and the car needs MOTd and taxed within the next two weeks. Being an adult in this time of increasingly clever technology, and perhaps finally having a career to show for twenty-seven years of study is exciting, but the responsibility of being an adult terrifies me.
I find myself longing to reconnect with elements of my youth, less because it was a simpler time, or there was less of a terror threat (I grew up during the tail end of the Cold War, the Northern Irish troubles and at age 8, a passenger jet exploded less than a hundred miles from my house, something that would cause me to dream about aviation disasters for decades); I just wish I could reconnect with the innocence and naivety and wonder I used to possess. When I used to have to work to find out information, rather than have it served to me by wireless and 3G technology.
It’s not healthy to dwell on the past, I know. But I think my nostalgia is also telling me that I’ve outgrown this place, and it’s challenging me to do something about it. I’m not sure that I can.
