Thursday, July 21, 2005

a nightmare at Warren Street

Well, here we are again, plugged into all of the internet news channels and the radio, trying to find out the details of the latest despicable attacks on the City. We are in an office on the perimeter of London, though many of my colleagues commute through the centre each day, and all of us have friends and relatives who work in central London. The cell networks are already jammed and, oddly, we are having difficulty getting a line to phone overseas...though perhaps that's not so odd as the emergency services will no doubt commandeer some of the terrestrial network and there must be many, many calls being made from overseas to check if colleagues and loved ones are okay.

This seems to be quite a trivial incident in comparison with the last, although the intention was surely the same, the bombs themselves appear not to have worked properly. I read one eyewitness account of a tube traveller who saw a man with a rucksack that exploded, but only enough to blow it apart, the description of the rucksackee was stunning, according to the eye witness he looked "dismayed"!! I should fucking coco, imagine how 'dismayed' the people around him were?

There has been a subtle readjustment over the past few weeks, in many ways the rhythm of London was hardly disturbed. We missed a step was all. There's always been a tacit acceptance of when rather than if something of this nature would happen, and the tube is such a soft target, and such a hideous prospect - an explosion in the crush and enclosure of the stations and carriages conjures a terrifying Dante-esque vision. And then when it did happen, perhaps, forgivably there was almost a sense of relief, it's happened and I wasn't involved, though I doubt whether anyone would admit to that particular dark thought.

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