Let's all dance! Let's all forget the dead! They don't matter! They don't exist!

My two countries both disgraced themselves in the third anniversary of the destruction of the Twin Towers. (Which I well remember visiting in 1985. If you haven't been there, you cannot imagine their sheer size, and the reason why 2700 people died.) Britain scheduled the nationwide festival of the Last Night of the Proms, with hundreds of thousands of people singing cheerful patriotic songs in chorus in five great cities, on September 11; and Italy scheduled the first day of the soccer championship on the same day. Let's all sing and cheer and be happy, as if we were not remembering thousands of murdered dead today - including, I seem to remember, 68 Britons and 38 Italians. The one concession made to the notion that someone, somewhere, might be unhappy today (and let us not even speak of the Ossetian children butchered a week or two ago!) was a Sousa march at the Proms; while Italian soccer, usually so ready to offer minutes' silences and black armbands for anyone who needed commemorating, simply did not seem to notice. All I can say is that the sombre, tasteful and quiet ceremony in New York City put us all to shame.