About getting 9/11 wrong

Donald Trump has been getting all in a tizzy about journalists suggesting that his memories of 9/11 and what he was doing that day are a wee bit confused. The strange thing is, I am uncharacteristically sympathetic to his plight, because it seems that I’ve been getting things wrong for 25 years as well.

A colleague asked me today where I was and what I was doing on that weird, ghastly day and I trotted out my usual story. That I’d been for a job interview that morning, then met a friend for lunch in Bloomsbury and, since neither of had anything more useful to do, we ambled over to the British Museum. There was an exhibition of projects by the architect Richard Rogers, including a proposed tower in Tokyo Bay that, had it been built, would have become the tallest in the world. To give a sense of scale, the model was presented alongside all the other buildings that had held that honour since the late 19th century. So when my wife phoned me to tell me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I was looking at a model of the World Trade Center, which had suddenly become more real than the thing in represented.

Except that belatedly, I just checked to see if I could find a photo of the models in question, only to discover the whole thing was a Norman Foster project and Richard Rogers had nothing to do with it. 

I apologise to all those I have unwittingly deceived.

Your turn, Donnie.

About Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry has died. You may not be able to place the name, let alone fit a face to it, but you know the buildings, the ones that look like a stack of imploding loo rolls, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Dancing House in Prague, the residential add-ons at our very own Battersea Power Station, beggin’ yer pardon, guvnor.

Not in the mind of a Daily Mail sub, though. In that strange, empty space, Gehry’s not an architect. He’s “Brad Pitt’s architect friend”.  And, look, a rock star employed him, and another actor wrote something. So he must be important. And moreover, the two actors and the musician require no clarification, but we need to have it explained to us that Gehry was an architect. Although if you need that level of explanation, why would you even care that he died?