Why did Talk magazine fold? Need you ask? The finger points squarely at al-Qaida. "We all had to realise that 9/11 changed everything," said Talk Media's president, Ron Galotti. Tina Brown, the magazine's former editor, put it more lyrically. "There's one odd you can't fight against and that's something that comes out of the sky. That is the only reason I'm not howling and bawling more." Many of that rising number of people, or businesses, who can only attribute their problems to the irruption of 9/11 make a similar show of restraint. To protest too much would be to equate their problems with the true, harrowing human tragedy of that day. Which would be in unforgivably poor taste. So they simply, undemonstratively let it be known that, though they are not making too much fuss about it, they, too, are victims. It's only because they are not actually dead that they are not howling and bawling more. But that doesn't mean that the agonies of what would otherwise be perfectly healthy magazines and restaurants, clothes shops and long-running musicals cannot, also, be inflicted without warning by something out of the sky.  At Photo-Me International, sales have dropped by a third. Last week, its chairman blamed    September 11, after which, he said, people were no longer in the mood to take "fun snaps" in photo-booths. To be sure, the company had also lost a contract from the Post Office and there had been changes to the Japanese driving-licence system, as well as a general economic downturn - the one that started before September 11. But the main reason for his company's difficulties came, like Talk magazine's, out of the sky. Curiously, the chastening influence of Osama does not seem to have inhibited the taking of fun snaps at home, for pre-Christmas photography sales were healthy, but that is another of the strange things about the business impact of September 11 - its victims are chosen seemingly at random.  Is there any reason, for example, why Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats should now collapse, its audiences supposedly depleted by the 9/11 impact on tourism, while rival West End shows such as Kiss Me Kate or the Lion King prosper? Why did people, post-September 11, still want to eat at branches of Cafe Rouge, but not at Planet Hollywood, which went into bankrupcy protection for the second time last October, this time with the novel excuse that terrorism had done for its burgers? Why was Matalan, the discount clothes store, excluded for no other discernible reason from the pre-Christmas spending boom that benefited many of its rivals, including Marks and Spencer, Next, Debenham's and Asda? Ian Smith, Matalan's finance director, maintained that 9/ll had presented the "most significant" challenge to its profits. "You'd be surprised," he said recently. "There has been a lot of comfort spending on luxury goods and something has got to give."  It's true, as Smith says, that sales of upmarket fun - jewellery and champagne, watches and perfume - have recently flourished, despite the gloom that afflicted former clients of Photo-Me. But even in the luxury-goods market, there are claims of victimhood. Gucci has complained of a post-terrorism slump, ditto Mulberry, which now attributes a recent profits warning to the same cause. A doleful 9/11 report from the French luxury goods business, LVMH, has coincided with surveys reporting the best Christmas sales for 15 years and surges in consumer confidence, in both America and the UK. In the aftermath of a terrorist massacre, it appears, high-spending yet comfort-seeking consumers become intensely selective in their choice of scent and bags, holidays and silk underwear. Either that, or floundering companies will make any excuse for incompetence, however nauseating.  The death of Diana, Princess of Wales once led to a similar profusion of shameless buck-passing. People were too traumatised to shop. Too gutted to work. Too pooped to listen to the radio. Today, the "tragic events" excuses, though less convincing by the week, show no sign of abating. The attacks have recently been held responsible not only for business doldrums and a cascade of - often unrelated, but long-desired - redundancies, but for the rise in London street crime, the crisis in Mariah Carey's career; even the resignation of Madonna's agent. It's only a matter of time before we hear that 9/ll is responsible for the dreadful trains, the vomiting bug, and the filthy weather. When we all know that's entirely the fault of foot and mouth. <BR><B>Does Tina have the write stuff?</B><BR>No sooner had Tina Brown been liberated from Talk than her diaries were being described as "the most coveted commodity among America's publishers". She could, it was said, "write her own cheque". A diary fragment, recently published in Talk, describing an encounter with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, was taken to offer a "tantalising glimpse" of the kind of biting yet insightful quality the purchaser might get for his or her zillions. Before they invite her to think of a number, though, publishers might like to see a more substantial example of Ms Brown's written work: Life as a Party, a collection of enthusiastic pieces about celebrities and the upper classes written when she edited Tatler. Examining swank estate agents, the critical eye that discerned everything from egg-stains to sexual impulses at her meeting with the Bayleys, saw only well-connected young men: "In Knight Frank's Hanover Square headquarters," ran a typical paragraph, "the social magnet is Christopher Chetwode, brother of the present baron. His mother is a Berry and 20 of his cousins are millionaires. The Sloane Street branch has Lady Rose Nevill, daughter of Lord Abergavenny, and Richard Ford, the son of the Queen's ex-assistant private secretary; while at the Ascot office country residential keeps its end up with the Earl of Shrewsbury's 25-year-old brother, Paul Chetwynd-Talbot."  Even if a certain level of indulgence was only politic from the editor of Tatler, this book suggests that, 20 years ago, the rich and grand had strikingly little to fear from Brown. Remove the sporadic pertnesses and bon-mots from the pages of Life as a Party, and you are left with a diligent collection of of party-lists, family trees and exhaustive inventories of real estate that owes more to Nigel Dempster than Tom Wolfe.  While some of her English contemporaries stood back a little, the better to observe the tribal rituals of Sloane Rangers, Brown seemed, in the early 80s, to prefer the traditional, prostrate perspective of Jennifer's Diary. "Although the Binnings live at Mellerstain," she writes, on a tour of Scottish stateleys, "the family seat is Tyninghame, a red, turreted, Gothic mansion overlooking the sea on the west coast of Scotland. Lord Binning's parents, the Earl (now 85) and Countess of Haddington have lived here since 1952, returning to Mellerstain in the winter to hunt. The whole family moves to Mellerstain at Christmas when the main house is opened up for 10 days. "It's wonderful to see wellies and coats outside rooms which spend the year looking perfect, says Prue..."  If, as such pieces suggest, the Brown diaries do not turn out to be the longed-for treasure-trove of scabrous indiscretion, they will, at least, provide an infallible guide to who, in the last quarter of a century, has been considered smart - or "hot" - and who has not. A trivial subject, perhaps, but one on which Tina Brown has contrived to build a long and scintillating career.