On 11th September 2001 I went to work at Norton Radstock College in my role as Director of the WCC.
I was working in my office, when someone came and said a plane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York.
I went the BBC News website, but it wouldn’t load. I initially put it down to the college network, but of course realised later on that it was excessive demand on their servers which was causing their site to fail to load. I tried a fair few times to get the front page to load, but had no luck.
In the end I went to the canteen where the news was on the TVs in there and there was loads of people, students and staff, just watching the TVs. I wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but as the day progressed it became much more apparent what had happened.
I listened to the radio news in my car on the way home, there was a lot more detail about what had happened, but less about the who and the why. We went to the gym and as I cycled away on the cycle machine the news was on the screens in front of me and the devastation and destruction was shown. It was awful. The cycle of news, of the plane crashing, the towers collapsing, the dust and debris cloud was right there in my face and it just added to my shock and disbelief.
Those memories of that day have stayed with me ever since then.