And, to be fair to George, the bit he'd remembered about his name was the most vital part. For the general whose support was essential in this war for civilisation came to power by using the military to overthrow an elected government. So, if there was one thing this man couldn't abide, it was people who use violence for political ends.By the middle of December, a US professor, Marc Herold, who investigated every alleged incident of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, could announce that the figure had reached 3,767 – more than the number killed in the World Trade Centre. It would be nice to think that someone had marked the moment the number overtook the New York figure. The year would be more, sort of, complete if when the news had come in that another shepherd had been frazzled somewhere, taking the number of Afghan fatalities to a winning total, Donald Rumsfeld shouted, "Bingo," or, "House" – to commemorate the year that revolved around 11 September, the day that nothing much changed More from Mark Steel. If you must insist on a theme, then I'm afraid you'll have to settle for "anticlimax", and not simply because last year's Millennium excesses in building and refurbishment made this year's renovations look like something of an afterthought.

It was also because the year broke its back across a sharp edge in the calendar – snapped into "before" and "after" by the attacks on the World Trade Centre on 11 September. Events from the beginning of the year aren't just hazier than those close by; they are an entirely different colour, too. It wasn't so much that art was impossible after 11 September – as some suggested while still in shock – but that it seemed to flop awkwardly between inconsequentiality and a sudden, entirely synthetic relevance. When David Rudkin's Sixties play Afore Night Come was revived at the Young Vic in October, for instance, a jumpy metropolitan audience found themselves flinching at the sound of a crop-spraying helicopter in a way that their predecessors wouldn't have.

Trevor Nunn's first musical this year, My Fair Lady, was accompanied only by press speculation over the state of Martine McCutcheon's larynx. His second, South Pacific, prompted some quite unintentional thoughts about American insularity.In some cases, the accidental connections seemed too painful to stand. Martin McDonagh's play The Lieutenant of Inishmore – a blood-splattered farce about the moral stupidity of terrorism – had a genuine application to the events of September, but fell victim to a widespread squeamishness in the immediate aftermath. It still waits for the West End transfer it would otherwise undoubtedly have got.

More mercifully, Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest film, Collateral Damage, which opened with a terrorist attack on a skyscraper, had its release date postponed – a rare instance of collateral benefit.The ill wind may ultimately prove to have blown him some good, because it was not a good year for cinematic explosions, which suddenly looked callow and callous in the light of those in New York. Anticlimax played its part here, too – Hannibal, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Pearl Harbor and AI: Artificial Intelligence all failed to live up to the global hype that preceded them. By general consensus, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone did, though there were some depressed by yet another contribution to the infantilisation of cinema audiences, a mental regression that ensured that Shrek and The Lord of the Rings would also be hits. The problem was that adult films were often very adult indeed – Sean Penn's The Pledge, Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher and Patrice Chereau's Intimacy were dark enough to deter all but the most dogged cinema-goers. You had to look hard for the antidotes to their black take on human nature, but they were there – in The Dish, an Australian film which proved that patriotism needn't be po-faced, and Together, which proved that satire needn't be entirely without human sympathy.In the theatre, the big, established companies made headlines mostly for institutional rather than artistic reasons. After much dithering and consultation, the National Theatre announced that Nicholas Hytner would eventually replace Trevor Nunn as artistic director, and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble unveiled new plans for a Shakespeare theme park in Stratford, to a disgruntled muttering from the spear-carriers and attendant Lords. There were organisational changes at other institutions, too – Sam Mendes bowing out from the Donmar Warehouse, after turning it into an entrep?or American talent, and Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent announcing that they would no longer run the Almeida Theatre.The latter gave us the year's most exciting theatrical space – a disused bus station in King's Cross, which was its temporary home while the Union Chapel was being renovated, and which changed for every production, from a sultry Lulu, starring Anna Friel, to Neil La Bute's The Shape of Things, a taut emotional drama that took its pacing from the world of films.