Served by Pat at 8.29am...

It wasn't a pilgrimage, but it wasn't really tourism either. Part of it was curiosity, but not morbid curiosity; part of it was compulsion.

We went to Ground Zero.

And actually, the renewal which is going on there is quite uplifting.

The big hole in the ground is no bigger than the big holes at any number of major construction projects...



...and the things which remind you of why it's there are round the corner or along side streets...





So it really wasn't morbid, at any point. And it wasn't really particularly easy to relate what happened here to what we all watched on television six years ago. Not because I'm heartless or unfeeling, lacking in sympathy or empathy; just because, initially at least, it was like visiting a film set. But, as I realised later, only because up until this point in my life, everything in New York was just a film set.

And then we went into the temporary visitor centre and listened to some of the personal testimonies and looked at some of the belongings of the victims discovered in the wreckage. But it still seemed like a story, something unreal.

But it was the receipt which did it...



Until I found it again on the exhibition website, I'd remembered it from the exhibition as a train ticket, one tiny bit of paper, recovered from the rubble with a few other belongings.

And for me, it was seeing 9/11/2001 on the receipt which actually made it all real. Something which happened to real people on a real day. Served by Pat at 8.29am...