No one knows whether John Henry ever lived. People’s heroes like Robin Hood, Captain Swing or Joe Hill have a way of remaining shadowy despite the enormous amount of research focussed on them. Some, of course, definitely did live. Hill did – Joseph Hilstrom, Swedish longshoreman and Wobbly, who probably wasn’t as lily white as labour myth paints him. Others probably didn’t live at all. John Henry may have. If so he was black, born into slavery, maybe in Alabama, and he took on the new technology of his day, the steam drill.

"Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened" - Jean Baudrillard

I imagine there can be very few people who don’t know where they were and what they were doing when they first saw the film footage of 9/11. In the 1960s, similarly, it was said that everyone could recall their movements at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. The death of Princess Diana was another legendary happening, but without a doubt 9/11 was the most gruesome of such events – the kind which have mythic proportions even before the print dries on the newspaper headlines.