It’s rare you get to look at an exact decade of your life. We all know what happened ten years ago. We can discuss deeply and from a vast collection of perspectives if and how it has changed the world on a macroscopic level. Today felt moving and poignant though as a result of seeing what changes ten years has wrought.

Ten years ago today I had lunch with my boss, Theo Bloom. My then girlfriend and now wife and business partner was on a business trip on the East Coast for the publisher we all worked for. Becky had just moved in to the flat I owned in Whitechapel. When Theo and I came back from lunch my thoughts were constantly on whether Becky was in the air and if she wasn’t persuading her not to be. We got two brief phone calls in and then all of the cellphone networks in New York understandably fell over, physically and literally. The first phone call was lots of discussion of not flying, the second was about trying to be the calm voice that anyone in a situation like that needed.

I remember clearly watching the second plane hit on our chairman’s Samsung monitor that doubled as a TV. Something that felt totally amazing back then: a flat screen 17” monitor that was also a TV. I remember clearly watching the BBC website fall over and be turned into something that resembled Web 0.1. No stylesheets and no images. Scale was everything. I ended up looking at the New York Times site, they were still updating it and no one in New York was able to see it or looking at it in any numbers.

I had what now seems an archaic Siemens phone. I lost it years ago but can picture it clearly today as if on that day. It had a brilliant feature. You could tell it how often to try and reconnect to a number. After 24 hours of an unavailable line, dialling every quarter of an hour it finally got through. 

I came up to Oxford to spend the evening with my now mother-in-law, both her children were in New York, Becky’s brother lives there, and it felt only right that she had company. We now live minutes away from her house and the restaurant where we ate that night. I now look on that evening as somewhat of a blessing. How often do you actually get to spend quality time with your in-laws and really get to know them well?

I remember getting the late night Oxford Tube bus back to London and doing that thing which felt so metropolitan, so cool, picking up the next day’s papers at Victoria station at about 3am. I read them in a cab back to Whitechapel. The papers were important to read, the news in them was still pretty new. Also Whitechapel was still only on dial up, BT didn’t see it as economically viable to provide ADSL. This feels crazy now considering it’s closeness to Hoxton, or Tech City as the government would have us call it. The main reason why I moved to Whitechapel was the vibrancy of the digital scene in Hoxton, even back then.

I spent the night watching news, hoping my phone would connect to Becky’s and also hoping that my dear friend Tom Guida was fine as I knew he worked near the World Trade Center.

Over the next week the world seemed odd and yet seemed to be slowly righting itself, but not. Virgin Atlantic called and asked me if I’d give up my flight to the US, I’d been planning on meeting up with Becky and going on vacation with her and her brother. I said yes straight away when I knew why they wanted it. They flew relatives of Cantor Fitzgerald back and forth across the Atlantic free. Richard Branson’s office emailed me from his account to thank me for giving up the flight. I’ve never been more proud or in awe of a company in my life than of them and the honourable way they acted.

Over the next week I saw a reaction against the lovely Muslim community I lived among in the East End. I had a spectacular argument with an amazingly insensitive, and zealous to the point of madness, evangelical Christian who was preaching outside Whitechapel tube, calling people heathens. My parents and I went to the mosque open day which they had nearly cancelled… it felt so important both for us and for the local muslims that we should all be together to disprove the ridiculousness that was going on. 

Then there was the war on terror. 

And what of today. Well, lots of thinking, lots of thanking and lots of being with family. It’s hard to say how the world has changed. It’s hard to write about it without trivialising it. What fascinates me in particular is how things like Twitter and Facebook and pervasive internet have reshaped our news delivery and moreover our world. I remember hearing Ben Hammersley and others liken Al Qaeda to a social network with an arms budget. I like to think of Twitter as a social network with a worldwide comforter, the #riotwombles being a classic example. We now have a collection of networks and technologies we can use to remake the world and respond to things in real time. If enough of us care we can be a force for good, we now have the tools, let’s use them.

My overriding feeling as I ate dinner with family this evening was of being lucky. So many family dinners have been missed as a result of things that happened ten years ago and in between. Men, women and children of every faith, denomination lost. It’s time to do what the Norwegian president suggested and to fight violence with democracy and tolerance for the next ten years and beyond.