Magor girl Antonia Kinlay, pictured, is a regular visitor to New York, where her father lives. Thankfully, he was in London at the time of the terror attacks. Here's Antonia's view of last week's events.

'THREE weeks ago I had dinner with my dad at Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Centre.

It had been my favourite restaurant for as long as I can remember and is close to our apartment.

There are people you see all the time but never really take a great deal of time to talk to.

For me that was people like the disabled lawyer in a wheelchair whom I passed regularly on the street - we used to talk about how he worked at the top of the World Trade Centre.

The 40,000 people who worked in the towers woke up that morning assuming that it was like any other day, one of the many days of the rest of their lives. Unfortunately they were wrong and I'm sure they all left many things unfinished.

They may have had an argument with a loved one, hurt someone or lied. Unlike us they don't have the privilege of having the rest of their lives to live, the freedom to make mistakes and to put them right, to love and to enjoy themselves.

None of us can predict when we are going to die and hopefully our deaths will be less dramatic and tragic than theirs.

Hopefully, too, we can learn something from the tragedy. Some people say it was an act of God, some people say it proves there is no God.

But at least let us try to live our lives so that as far as possible we have no regrets about what we have and haven't done. I know now how much my friends and family mean to me. I also know how that in the future when I have what seems like a terrible day I will look back to September 11 and put everything in perspective.

Sooner or later all of our lives are touched with tragedy of one kind or another and this atrocity has touched many people.

The World Trade Centre, though, and the streets around it are my home and are as familiar to me as John Frost Square and the streets of Newport, so I take what has happened very personally.

It seems to me, though, that we have to move on and the important thing is not just the tragedy itself but how we deal with it and how we learn from it.

There is something that I believe we can all learn from the terrible events of September 11 and that is just how precious life is and how important it is to live each day to its full potential.

"It's just a shame it took such a catastrophe to make me realise that.'