20 years ago today I was camping in Namibia's Namib desert when someone came over and told us that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre building in New York and it had collapsed.
We listened to the BBC World Service on a crackly radio, but sitting by a campfire in a remote place amongst the magnificence of some the biggest sand dunes in the world, the enormity of what had just happened thousands of miles away completely escaped me. It was over a week until I actually saw the footage of the collapsing towers when staying at a hostel in South Africa where they had a TV.
These days of course the Namib desert doubtless enjoys a better mobile phone signal than Brackley or Barnsley, and we would have all been glued to our phones watching events unfold in real time.
Where were you and what were you doing when you heard the news?