In my quiet little English village on the other side of the world, I was surprised that 9-11 made such a big impact. For me, the big problem with 9-11 was that the Americans don’t know how to say the date properly. Month-Day-Year, that’s so illogical, in any civilized country it would be Day-Month-Year. But despite my efforts my neighbors rejected our good old English 11th of the 9th and called it the Yankee 9-11.

And we all panicked, although, of course, there was nothing in our village worth a hijacked airliner crashing into. I’m sorry to say that I added to the panic when I said during a village meeting in the pub-“but what if they put poison or bacteria into the water supply?” This was meant as a joke but it led to two hours of discussion on countermeasures. One neighbor, an immigrant from Eastern Europe said “We need to test the water on our pets every day, to show it’s safe for us”. This stopped the discussion stone dead, and everyone looked at him aghast.  “Erich”,  I said, “Don’t say that even as a joke. You foreigners don’t understand that we British love our pets more than our families. If anyone has to risk testing the water, it will be us, to protect our precious pets.”

Erich’s suggestion did give us an idea. Farmer Jones had to milk his cows very early every morning, and they always drank after milking. He undertook to check that they were OK afterwards.  If there were a problem he would go to the church to ring the bells as an alarm signal.  Luckily we were spared a poison attack, although one morning an early practice session of the village bell-ringers put us all into a state of terror.

Isn’t it an odd world that we live in?