London, just London

I haven’t felt quite ready to return to the cut and thrust of the blog­ging world quite yet, but events have this nasty habit of com­ing along and dis­turb­ing all your best-laid plans, don’t they?

Apo­lo­gies, then, if these thoughts seem rather jumbled and dis­con­nec­ted, but that’s because my mind is rather jumbled and dis­con­nec­ted. It’s been quite a day, a two hour jour­ney home via a selec­tion of unknown bus routes didn’t help mat­ters, besides which I’ve just watched nearly three hours of news coverage.

It’s an odd sen­sa­tion — an almost queasy sen­sa­tion — see­ing streets and sights you know look­ing so alien. Debris, injured people, emer­gency ser­vices scam­per­ing every­where, even spattered blood.

I’m already feel­ing bad about my first reac­tion when the news star­ted com­ing in this morn­ing, at a time when we were all still under the impres­sion that the incid­ents had been caused by a ‘power surge’ on the tube. I think I prob­ably uttered some cyn­ical, well-rehearsed but ter­ribly tired com­ments about the tube sys­tem grind­ing to a halt, creak­ing infra­struc­ture, blah blah blah.

Of course, as the morn­ing developed, my heart sank. I shivered.

I feel the need to repeat that — I shivered. Sit­ting at my desk, dis­cuss­ing the events with col­leagues with an increas­ing sense of alarm, and I was shivering.

Para­noia and lack of self-confidence went out of the win­dow, as I picked up my mobile phone and instantly texted people. An act that would nor­mally take me half an hour of men­tal pre­par­a­tion and wor­ry­ing was done without a second thought. I needed to know that the people I cared about were safe, and any of my little screw-ups about ‘both­er­ing’ people who didn’t want to be bothered were the last thing on my mind.

I knew that one friend was very likely to be using Edg­ware Road sta­tion. For­tu­nately, I heard from her very quickly. She had for­got­ten to go to M&S to buy her­self a sand­wich for lunch, so she nipped back to get it. If she hadn’t, she might well have been at the sta­tion, pos­sibly even on the train, at the exact moment the explo­sion happened. As it was, by the time she turned up, Edg­ware Road was closed and the area was being cleared.

Another friend — well, I was a little wor­ried that she might have been in the King’s Cross/Russell Square area, but I couldn’t get through to her mobile. Land­line calls were made between vari­ous mutual friends and acquaint­ances. Had any­one heard from her? Did any­one know where she was? No and no.

It wasn’t until about four o’clock this after­noon that I received any news. Details are still a little sketchy, but it seems that she had been stand­ing on the Pic­ca­dilly Line plat­form at King’s Cross wait­ing for a train — the train on which the second of today’s explo­sions happened — when she heard an almighty bang from inside the tun­nel. Appar­ently, she sus­tained a few small cuts and bruises, the lat­ter caused mainly by the rush to get out of the sta­tion, but oth­er­wise she’s OK. Shaken but safe.

Two near misses. Two lucky escapes. People I know. People whom I’m for­tu­nate enough to call friends. Another one of those shivers has just gone through me.

“They choose to come to Lon­don, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be them­selves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and noth­ing you do, how­ever many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where free­dom is strong and where people can live in har­mony with one another. Whatever you do, how­ever many you kill, you will fail” — Ken Liv­ing­stone, Mayor of London

I’m ter­ribly cyn­ical at times. Hor­ribly cyn­ical. You’ll have noticed that by now, no doubt. A speech like the one given earlier today by Ken Liv­ing­stone would nor­mally have me snort­ing with deri­sion. Not today, though. Today, this city that I some­times can’t abide, this city that I’ve called home since 1989 but have fre­quently dreamt of get­ting the hell out of, this city that has some­times seemed like the lone­li­est and most unfriendly place in the world, this city with all its incess­ant noise and fumes and lit­ter and crime and, oh, you know, all that annoy­ing urban stuff — well, today this is my city, and I’m proud of it.

If any­thing, I’ve got an even higher regard for Lon­don after today’s tra­gic events than I had yes­ter­day, when the suc­cess of the city’s 2012 Olympic bid was announced. The people behind that event seemed to me like dis­tant soci­ety fig­ures, no mat­ter how much they talked about this being “our suc­cess” and “our Olympics”. But today has been all about how the people of Lon­don — and in that I include the superb pro­fes­sion­al­ism and calm­ing author­ity of the emer­gency ser­vices — reacted remark­ably to a series of unpre­dict­able and shock­ingly viol­ent events.