Where we you on 9/11? Do you remember what you were doing? Chris Lloyd was watching events unfold on television. This is how he described them in The Northern Echo the following day

'I REPEAT: this is not Hollywood," said the shocked US television commentator. "This is real."

Then words failed him. He stuttered into silence. Perhaps there was nothing left to say. Without accompaniment, a televisual catastrophe – an attack on the heart of western civilisation – unfolded live, amid clouds of billowing smoke, on billions of screens around the world.

It was shortly after 2pm. A few minutes earlier, the commentators had been talking over what had appeared to be a clumsy tragedy: a blundering pilot had somehow managed to fly his plane into the top of one of the world's tallest buildings.

But then, from the left of the screen, came the silhouette of a second jetliner. It tilted its wings – a black blob of an engine on each with a fat belly of a fuselage in between – and turned a semi-circle. It took deliberate aim with its nose and, as if controlled by an expert schoolboy at the joystick of a computer game, buried itself in a vivid orange fireball into the second tower of the World Trade Centre.

It burrowed itself so deep into this steel and concrete construction that the far wall of the tower flexed and folded like flimsy paper.

"It seems like it has gone straight into the side of the building," said the commentator in disbelief.

In that moment, 2.03pm British Summer Time on September 11, 2001, it became clear that war had been declared on America.

In 1938, in the days before television, Americans had tuned into a wireless broadcast of HG Wells' War of the Worlds and had convinced themselves that aliens were invading the earth from the sky. They ran in panic from the fiction, their mental pictures looking something like the aerial attacks that were now raining down live on CNN and the Fox Network.

"I repeat: this is not Hollywood," said the commentator. "This is real."

And in those three words, the reality struck home. Imagine the last seconds of those 53 passengers on the hijacked Boeing 767 as it tilted its wings, turned its arc and piloted them to certain death. Imagine the last seconds of those on the 67th floor as the Boeing piled in. Imagine, if you can, the crazed last thoughts of the kamikaze pilot as he struck his target – were they pleasure at months of planning working so well or were they a sickening realisation that no cause can be worth the carnage he was creating?

"People are jumping from the lower storey windows," screamed an eyewitness.

What do you count as the lower storeys of a 110-floor building? Twentieth or 30th floor? Imagine their terror as their only way out was to jump from such heights.

The helicopter camera cut to a wide screen view.

It was a perfect day. Blue sky; bright sunshine. Huge clouds of beige smoke, lit from behind by the sun, drifted lazily across the Manhattan filmset. In the foreground beside the azure blue of the Hudson River, which was decorated with the white trails of ploughing boats, was the copper green form of the Statue of Liberty. Defiantly, she thrust forwards her burning torch which symbolises freedom, but she was overwhelmed by the scale of the blaze at the heart of free world on the other side of the river.

The commentators regained their composure. The airwaves filled with speculation. Thousands were dead. The Pentagon in Washington was burning. More hijacked planes were in the air. They were on their way to strike the home of the American president, the White House.

The cameras cut to its alabaster dome, its icing-white tiers looking as fragile as a wedding cake against the wide blue skies from which attack was expected.

It did not come. The TV directors kept cutting back to the perfect shape of the White House dome – perhaps in the hope of pictures the whole world would want to see, perhaps in relief that its perfection was still complete. Instead, they concentrated on the crumbling shapes of the World Trade Centre towers in Manhattan.

Little more than an hour after the first attack, debris was tumbling in a volcanic avalanche down the sides of the south tower – it looked like ticker-tape glimmering in the sun but it was substantial lumps of steel and concrete and human body parts.

Then the tower subsided into a cloud of rubble and dust.

But this was more than a skyscraper crumbling. It was the very heart of Western power. There is no greater symbol of the capitalist web which enmeshes much of the world than the Trade Centre. Its ebbs and floes touched all our lives.

And there is no greater symbol of military might than the Pentagon. From there, America's opponents would say it organises its oppression of its enemies.

From these buildings, America's tentacles spread around the world. She is the great superpower of our age whose designs, under her new president, spread beyond our world. George W Bush boasts of his plan to throw an electronic shield around his beloved country that will be so high it will go beyond our atmosphere and penetrate space. It will, he says, protect the land of the free from missiles launched from foreign fields.

Yet it couldn't even protect itself from a couple of rogue planes launched from its own airstrips. Here, live on TV, America's financial centre was crumbling before the world's eyes and its military core was melting down in a plume of acrid, grey smoke. There is more than a little irony in the fact that while America has been dreaming of Star Wars it has forgotten to put a lock on its own back door.

Just to emphasise the global nature of the outrage – and to remind us just how small the sophisticated electronicry of the multinational companies based in the World Trade Centre has made the world – within 56 minutes of the second jet crashing, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair was able to respond to the events. Only 20 years ago, during the Falklands War at the bottom of the globe, it took days for pictures to wend their way back to Britain. Now every bomb and blast on the other side of the world is broadcast live on TV as it happens. We see people die as the life fades from them. In the case of the passengers on the Boeing 767 and the workers in the north tower, we knew their deaths were inevitable before they had happened. We knew that the wings were tilting, the arc was being turned, and the aim was being taken long seconds before they did.

"I repeat: this is not Hollywood. This is real."

Just to remind us, before Mr Blair had finished expressing his shock, horror and outrage, we knew that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department in Washington and that a fourth hijacked plane had crashed near Somerset County Airport near Pittsburgh. In the space of a couple of soundbite sentences, we knew that a couple hundred more people had died.

The TV director cut live to Manhattan at 3.27pm. The north tower of the World Trade Centre responded to its cue, and collapsed before the world's watching eyes.

In its way, it was a graceful, beautiful collapse. The tower imploded, falling in on itself, sending out an umbrella of smoking pieces of debris that spun high into the sky before plummeting to earth. They were as pretty as a firework commemorating Guy Fawkes' failed attempt to blow up the British Houses of Parliament.

Only without the colour. All they could offer was grey and beige smoke and dust. The director zoomed in close on the crowds running and running in vain attempts to escape the all-enveloping clouds. He might even have been trying to find the remains of the inscribed mantle from above the World Trade Centre's door which must, in the words of Ozymandias, have read: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

As the dust settled on America last night, the repercussions of yesterday's events will be felt around the world for many years to come. And this morning, as you watch live on breakfast television the rescue operation, it is a world that is a smaller, more vulnerable place.