You know September 11 last year did not change my life. I don't think it even changed my world very much. I don't mean to sound unfeeling, but unless you were personally acquainted with one of the people who died in the aeroplanes or on the ground, I don't think it changed anyone's life. Not really.

I am not one of those people who seeks to minimise the horror of what happened a year ago by making snide cracks about America, or even about Americans. Nor am I quite so desensitised to the world that I can treat the event as though it really was just something that happened on television.

As it happens, I quite like America. I like Hollywood and hamburgers and Coca-Cola and all those other products of American culture it has become so fashionable to deplore. If it weren't for Hollywood, we would all be watching endless subtitled movies about young girls coming of age in rural French villages with the help of unshaven men in dungarees.

And the next time you feel like complaining about Yankee fast food, go to Moscow and try one of the delicious traditional Russian takeaway snacks, and see what it would have been like if they had won.

As it happens, I quite like America

("Excuse me."

"Da?"

"I don't mean to complain, but I've been queuing for three hours for this carton of cabbage soup..."

"Da?"

"Well, I hate to make a fuss, but you seem to have forgotten the cabbage."

Some lovers wear their hearts on their sleeves

"You do not like traditional Russian cabbage soup snack?"

"Oh I do, I do, comrade, don't get me wrong. It's just that, without cabbage, the cabbage soup is not really soup, is it? It's more like hot water. Well, warm water, actually."

"Decadent Yankee dog! Is that a copy of Solzhenitsyn I see in your pocket?")

But I am not here to defend America. America has lots of people with guns who get paid to do that. I am just saying that I grow weary of hearing how much September 11 changed the course of history, how much it reshaped our shared destiny and refashioned the very contours of modern life.

George Bush, looking to build his war coalition, shrewdly painted the attack as an assault on all the democracies of the world, in the same way that the American baseball championships are called the World Series.

Still, the rest of the world is always flattered when America chooses to include it in its affairs, so everywhere newspapers scrambled to pen foolish headlines like "The Day the World Changed" and "Apocalypse NY" and "Armageddon Out of Here". I'm not sure if the sales of generators and canned tuna - those perennial favourite South African pre-packaged panic products - actually spiked again, but the media hubbub was as wildly exaggerated and frankly unintelligent as the media coverage of all the other impending cataclysms of the past 10 years.

I was not much interested in the sonorous September 11 documentaries that clogged the airwaves this week. For the most part they were all sound effect and serious voices and footage of blips on radar screens. There is nothing much new to say about September 11, and to fill the gaps with visuals from a Tom Clancy novel struck me as distasteful. And also very boring.

Instead I treated myself to a celebratory dose of authentic Americana. The Jerry Springer Show (DSTV; Series Channel) made the point once more that, even in times of tragedy and national crisis, ordinary people still go about doing what they always do - mainly, they go about making an unspeakable mess of their lives.

This week we met Harry, a devotee of the little-practised art of refluxology. He didn't call it refluxology, but he really should have. The refluxologist is one who can vomit at will. Harry not only vomits recreationally, but he has a compulsion to vomit on his sexual partners during intimate moments. It seems Harry doesn't like to make love on a full stomach. Some lovers wear their hearts on their sleeves; Harry wears his breakfast on his girlfriends.

We were introduced to Harry's new partner. Harry's new partner sat in front of the cameras and the live studio audience while Harry vomited on her. They were not having sex or anything. Not all vomiting has to lead to sex, after all. Sometimes it can be comforting just to cuddle and have a bit of a vomit. It was a chaste vomit. You might almost call it a romantic vomit. "Why do you let him do it?" asked Jerry. "I like to make him happy," said Harry's new partner, wringing Harry's digestive juices from her hair.

But who are we to judge how other people love? It is love that makes the world go round. Sometimes it makes the world go pear-shaped, but mostly it goes round. Jerry introduced us to Jake and Lucy, who had a message for the world: "We must all love each other, because we are all each other's brothers and sisters." They meant that literally. "Adam and Eve were brother and sister," they said, earnestly if not especially Biblically, "so we must all be brothers and sisters."

They had a special reason for saying this: they were brother and sister. They didn't really resemble each other, because she had only one tooth, while he had at least four, but they had birth certificates to prove it.

Why had they turned to each other for a sexual relationship? "Well, I feel like he really knows me," she said. "He treats me right. And he's cute." They kissed wetly. It was a moment to make you glow all over. "Only," said Jerry, raising his eyes to the flag, "in America."