There is nothing the media like more than an anniversary. It's an easy way to tell a story again, to look back and see how the world has changed between then and now. Sometimes it can feel like a reach - I don't know about you, but the 50th anniversary of Barbie, which sent thousands wild with excitement in 2009, left me a little cold. I couldn't bring myself to celebrate a half-century of a plastic doll that makes little girls think they haven't lived unless they have a set of pink luggage, improbably blonde hair and a body based on male fantasy.

On the other hand, I loved the ten-years-since-Britpop media feeding frenzy. All those memories of bad haircuts and Oasis gigs where Liam Gallagher always looked like he was on the verge of headbutting everyone, on stage and off - ah, those were the days. But I doubt that anyone who wasn't aged between 12 and 16 in the Britpop era was bothered by the fact that a decade had passed since "Roll With It" was a hit. That's the problem with anniversaries: they mean so much more to people who were directly involved in the original event than anyone else.

We've got a big one on our hands at the moment. Ten years on from the 11 September 2001 attacks, every media organisation on earth has the opportunity to mull over the violent events of that day and the decade that followed. Apparently magazines in New York competed over how they would cover the occasion. It's no bad thing. Sometimes we forget to remember, and we all know that's when things can go horribly wrong. And that
day, perhaps more than any other in living memory, led to a string of events many wish had never happened. Commemorating is an opportunity to mourn, and to hope that nothing similar ever happens again. It always does, though. Damn history, with its habit of repeating itself.

The word, by the way, comes from the Latin anniversarium, meaning to return annually, from annus (year) and vertere (to return). Somehow the idea of returning is a good one. It is not about using the event for one's own purposes, or drawing false lessons from it, but returning, again and again, to the day itself, in all its horror and unreality.