Writer's block question - where were you?

Ten years ago today...

We were on holiday in France, in the Dordogne. We'd gone back to the gite and we turned the TV on to try and get a weather forecast for the next day.

At first we thought that we'd got the wrong channel, had tuned into a disaster movie by mistake. Then, as I started to translate what the announcer was saying, we realised that it wasn't a movie, it was real.

Over the next couple of days we kept getting stopped everywhere we went by Americans asking us to translate the French newspapers for them, they were desperate for news and couldn't get anything in English. We felt a long way from home; how much worse it must have been for them.

I still have a strong feeling that the world changed that day; it certainly did for me, even though I had no direct connection to anyone who died.