I never purposefully set out to listen to Alistair Cooke read his Letter From America, although as a sometime Radio 4 listener I heard plenty of them, if less so in recent years.
The BBC are “sort of” replacing him with Harold Evans, another British journalist of long standing who now resides on the other side of the Atlantic. His first contribution can be found here, and makes for a worthwhile read. I’m not completely sure I agree with him 100% but then again, I don’t live there.
But I think that Rasha from Cairo (second comment down), has a very fair point when noting the lack of numerical mnemonic to remember the Egyptian attack last month. I completely agree, and positively loathe the way it was immediately tagged 7/7. Hands up anyone who can remember the date of the Omagh bomb? No? Didn’t get the whole date thing did it.
It just seems thoroughly insensitive to other country’s tragedies that we somehow elevate ours above theirs? I suppose floods in India or famines in Niger don’t get neat days for the nomenclature because they happen over days, months or years, and aren’t the effects of terrorism. The fact that the scale is as large, if not larger than Sept 11 is neither here nor there.
In any case, I’m pedantically against calling Sept 11 “9/11” since events didn’t take place in November. (I’m with Eddie Izzard on this one).