THERE WAS AN extra little chill of horror running down my spine on Tuesday night while watching the calamity unfold at the World Trade Centre in New York.
If I still had my previous job as a portfolio strategist, I could have been there. Mid-September for most years was the time for a roadshow to brief clients on events in Asia. New York was at least a three-day stop, with several meetings scheduled in those twin towers.
They were mostly morning meetings too, often a breakfast meeting in the Vista Hotel, and then up either of the towers to see clients we had not met earlier.
It seems strange now to remember how tight the security was there. Since the 1993 bombing of the Vista Hotel, which seems to have been aimed at bringing at least one of the towers down, the World Trade Centre has had the tightest security in New York.
To see someone, you first had to stand in line at a long security desk where you had to turn over at least one piece of photo identification and have your name checked against a list of visitors, or have security phone upstairs to check with the people you were seeing.
There was nothing routine about this. The security guards were grim and determined. You made no jokes about it in front of them. This sort of thing you frequently encountered in London when IRA-bombing campaigns were at their height, but it was unusual in the United States.
And then you went up in the lift and changed to another if you were going near the top. One client's office was a few floors from the top of the South Tower and the receptionist there was accustomed to people gazing over her shoulder to the windows facing south, high over the other buildings of downtown Manhattan.