For most people in the western world – and many elsewhere – 11th September 2001, or 9/11, was quite a memorable day.

Not for me. The day came and went without anything odd occuring.

Strange as it might sound in these days of Twitter, smartphones and news on the go, I didn’t find out about it the destruction of New York’s World Trade Centre until the 13th – two days later.

Since several people have asked since I tweeted about it, here’s the story.

My wife and I were taking the worst holiday we’ve ever had together. We’d flown out to Italy with our son, who at the time was nearly two, and driven to a villa up an Umbrian hill.

Italy was beautiful, the people friendly, the food delicious, the tourist outings full of things of interest to young tourists eager to lap up the local culture with trips to Asissi, Siena, Perugia, Florence and more.

Sadly, we were sufficiently young and foolish not to have realised that having a young child eager to be off and exploring at every chance, and with a very, very low boredom threshold, wasn’t the ideal addition to a vacation that would have been delightful with just the two of us.

I can only apologise to the other passengers on the plane from Amsterdam to Rome who had to put up with his screaming for the whole journey – he wanted to be walking up and down the aeroplane, not being held on my lap.

The villa was up a steep road. It had no TV or radio – nothing to keep a child entertained. It had a swimming pool, so requiring our constant vigilance if he stepped outside the door. Our son had just mastered the skill of climbing out of his cot at night and was eager to get in as much practice as possible.

In short, much as we tried to do holiday things, we both returned home a lot more exhausted than if we’d not gone at all.

So that was our cultural but rubbish holiday. 11th September came and went in totally unremarkable fashion. We didn’t have TV or radio. The english language newspapers on sale in the local village were several days old. The rest of the world had come to shuddering halt, but we carried on oblivious (I don’t recall, but I assume we didn’t go to any bigger towns or cities on the 11th or 12th).

We only found out on the 13th. The property owner dropped by. He’d been speaking to an American family in a nearby villa who were a little bit stuck, seeing as how all flights over American airspace had been halted, and were trying to figure out how and when they could get back home. He was as surprised as anyone that we didn’t know.

Next day we were due to leave. We drove to Rome and found coverage was still pretty much 24×7 on CNN in the hotel room.

Seems very odd, especially today in our ultra-connected world, but of course it made no difference to us finding out two days later. The world has a way of carrying on whether I know about it or not.

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