BEN HARVEY: 9/11’s lasting legacy is our loss of innocence

Richmond Park Golf Club in south-west London was, by Australian standards, not much chop.

I say was because I haven’t played there for many years, and it may have improved.

A lot has changed in Ted Lasso’s home town since I lived there.

The course’s greens were small, patchy and heavily dimpled with divots because the grass couldn’t grow fast enough to make up for the foot traffic.

In winter, the narrow fairways turned into boggy marshes and in summer they were concrete hard as the mud turned to baked clay.

The service at the pro shop was crap (as most English service was and still is) and to top it all off it was bloody expensive to play there.

As I said, not much chop.

But . . . on a sunny autumn day there were few nicer places to be. I imagine that’s still the case.

Richmond is quite close to Heathrow airport and depending on which flight path is operational on any given day you can see the pop rivets on the Rolls-Royce engines of the planes as they come in to land.

When I lived there, the first flights of the day were all from Australia. They arrived just before 6am and after the quiet of the night, the roar of their engines was extraordinary.

Sleep? No chance; the cockpit was so close to my bedroom I could see the pilot picking his nose.

Hundreds of planes came and went throughout the day and after a few months of living there the background howling turbines became like white noise.

Some of the tees on the golf course were quite elevated, so you got a good view of the planes as they homed in on Heathrow.

They were lined up as far as the eye could see and above them were dozens of other planes circling in holding positions at different altitudes as pilots waited for the tower to clear them to join the queue on the runway approach.

I spent most of my time in the golf course searching for my ball in the rough. I usually ended up so far off the fairway I was in a different postcode to the clubhouse and spent hours hunting in brambles so thick and ancient I expected to come across a Roman settlement.

Eventually, having explored most of greater Surrey in search of a recalcitrant Titleist, I would make it to the green.

It was while standing on one of those small, patchy and heavily dimpled circles of turf many years ago that I noticed the air traffic around Heathrow was behaving oddly.

The usually methodical pattern of flights seemed jerky, and I saw a couple of aborted landings. The planes circling vastly outnumbered those on approach to the runway.

It would be a couple of hours before I learnt why this was happening.

That strange day on the golf course was September 11, 2001.

Fortress America had been breached and, for the first time, terrorism wasn’t something confined to places like the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

The reckless hate of religious fanatics was suddenly transportable.

Life was never the same.

The legacies of the Twin Towers attacks are writ large on everyday life — and not just because just about every policy decision made by any government is constructed through a 9/11 lens.

Younger people think it is normal to have their bodies scanned at airports.

They think nothing of seeing an army of security guards at the front entrances of government buildings.

The requirement to produce ID to do just about anything is an ordinary part of life.

They are conditioned to being “alert, not alarmed” because they haven’t known anything else.

I feel sad for the generations that can’t remember the time before 9/11 because they never got to experience life in a world where everyone wasn’t suspicious of each other.

A world where we were not always scared.

A world that felt safe.

The 25-year war on terror has cost us more than we can possibly calculate — and not just in terms of bullets and bombs.

The blanket of security that everything has needed to be swaddled in is a baked-in cost of modern commerce.

Does anyone feel safer having spent trillions of dollars and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives?

The greatest cost isn’t blood and treasure; it’s the loss of our humanity.