God's Own Country: Introduction

The Cataclysm came at 6:13pm GMT, July 2nd, 2007.

Everyone thought the world would either end when God would call it a day in a hundred years, or that some asteroid would crash into the Earth in 2012. But it was so much sooner than that.

Do you remember 9/11?
I do. I was thirteen years old when it happened. My birthday was a week and a day before the attacks. My transition from childhood into adolescence wasn’t a particularly blissful one. I remember watching those planes smash into the towers, watching them crumble. Nineteen men brought an entire city, no, an entire country to its knees. I remember thinking it was the end of the world. It was the end of something, alright. Innocence, perhaps. Maybe it was the end of peace. The end of happiness. But we had no idea what was headed our way.
Living in Belfast, I had heard my fair share of horror stories from the Troubles, a period of time that was on its deathbed by the time I was born. Although there was Omagh. 29 people killed. The last death throe of a senseless conflict, perhaps. My parents and the generation preceding mine had become desensitised to the violence at home. So when the wars broke out across the Middle East and elsewhere, they shrugged it off as an everyday thing. All except my generation who had yet to be baptised by fire. The previous generations had earned their right to exist and inherit the world through two world wars, hundreds of civil wars and the constant fear of nuclear annihilation.
But we hadn’t.
It was a rebirth for everyone, not just my generation.