Today marks the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. I am sat here watching the film United 93 on DVD, and wanted to put my thoughts on the tragedy up here.

I remember where I was when I first heard something was happening - I was walking through the high street in Melton Mowbray when I saw the World Trade Center on TV. It must have been soon after the first plane hit, because the ticker at the bottom of the page just said something like "'LIGHT AIRCRAFT' CRASHES INTO WORLD TRADE CENTER". I, as everyone else did, either sensed something big was happening, or just had that strange fascination with seeing disaster on such a large scale - and I rushed home to watch the coverage on TV. By the time I got home the second plane had just crashed and they were starting to call it an attack.

It was strangely numbing, especially after the towers fell. Coming from such a small town, it was hard to comprehend the scale of the disaster, how these buildings could contain so many thousands of people, what could we ever do to be safe against such an attack?

5 years on, without another major attack on the US, but with bombings in Madrid and London we are still not safe and probably never will be again. When people complain about police and government intrusion, and scoff at the arrest of people caught planning attacks I think what people would have said if the 911 hijackers had been caught: "They never could have pulled it off, nobody could hijack a plane with a knife." So I applaud the progress made by the US and UK governments in arresting so many of these would-be murderers, we may never know the many tragedies they have stopped.