What major historical events do you remember?

9/11. I mean, who doesn’t?

But, being as I was soon to be 18, a symbolic marker point from transition from childhood to adulthood, 9/11 became that marker point.

Everything before seemed secure. If not rose-tinted, then at least buffeted by a secure horizon of endless ok-ness in a western consumer bubble.

Nobody can yet explain how 9/11 felt except by using the John Carpenter film title ‘in the mouth of madness’.  The outside and Inside, the real and unreal collided in a way that made an entire coming generation want to run away into nostalgia and nihilism.

It wasn’t the worst thing to ever happen to anyone, but it marked a point of no return: from the anticipatory culture of an analogue mass media culture waiting for a millennium to a desensitised “always on” (and always watching) culture of no more surprises or mystery.

Worse things have happened since, not least in the past 2 years, but nothing will alter a culture quite as bluntly as 9/11.