The Cold Light Of The Day After

As I mentioned in my last post, London's Underground is the deepest in the world. As I write, at 22.00 p.m. GMT, that's 36-ish hours after the bombs went off, and there are still dead bodies left under King's Cross, because rescue workers can't reach the carriages. The old tunnels aren't safe, so people are rotting down in the dark.

It sounds grotesque; it is grotesque on my part, to write that. But it's true. It's also true that for once I'm proud to be a passing part of this valiant little country; I think these terrorists will be caught, and I'm moved to see these stuffy English people who annoy me so much, who I avoid when abroad and make such a big point of not being entirely part of, living up to the myth of the stiff-upper-lip they made for themselves. I felt for Tony Blair, which is no light matter for me; I don't like some of his policies, but I could see the genuine love of his country in his pain yesterday. I think any country whose leader genuinely feels that kind of patriotism is pretty fortunate. I think if we reran the election tomorrow he'd romp home.

Generally, it feels like people are as much angry as they are scared; how dare you (hideous racial expletive deleted) come to our Dowager Queen of a city with your foreign quarrels and expect to scare us? Whoever did plan this could probably have chosen a better year than this, the 60th Anniversary of the end of WWII and the 200th Anniversary of Trafalgar; we've been treated to more than our fair share of jingoism recently, it'd take an invasion fleet to make people put their umbrellas down.

Watching our 9/11

I'm beginning this post at 10.35 a.m., watching the events in London unfold on the BBC. According to the Beeb, bombs are going off all over the place, in tubes, in buses, in litter bins. First of all, to the surprise of no-one, the Govt lied: it was a "power surge", they announced, which had shut down the Underground at 8.50 a.m., the end of the morning rush hour. Oh yeah? Somebody plugged in a hairdryer and popped the fuse, did they? Power surge from where? To shut down the Tube, you'd need half of London. Govts never understand that lies are much scarier than an honest "I don't know". If there's still a south of England when I get up tomorrow, I'll give a little thought to why Govts first instinct in an emergency (ahem, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Sellafield, need I go in....?) is to lie.

When more and more bombs began to explode on buses, clearly the "power surge" fib had to be jettisoned, but "a Home Office Spokesman" came on to reassure us that "There is no proof yet that this is terrorist activity". Yes? So what the fuck is it then? Mass explosive spontaneous combustion, perhaps? God finally getting personally annoyed with people and smiting them with wroth, or wrath, or lightning? The last time I felt like this really was 9/11; it's my birthday, I was watching live on CNN in Belgium and there was the same bewilderment amongst the reporters and witnesses. People, journalists and the Govt alike, whose normal lives had suddenly been exposed to unimaginable chaos. People who don't believe what they're seeing.

And we're all secretly thinking "What if they're dirty bombs?". There's been a lot of chitchat in the press over recent months about how devastating that would be; small easily concealed bombs with a pinch of plutonium. Or anthrax, or whatever. Biological warfare, although none of us are supposed to have any and we all pretend it doesn't exist. There have been enough nightmare scenarios conjured up by our Govt to force through "anti-terrorist" laws which were really gross abrogations of civil rights, and which, clearly, haven't worked. The Govt and the press, to a certain extent, worked together to make us afraid enough to accept "anti-terror" laws which chipped away at basic civil rights; we're a scared nation, now it looks like we're a wounded nation. My phone's ringing off the hook, friends in London phoning, others (worryingly) not.

Somebody did this. That makes me so angry; human beings did this to other human beings in the name of - well, we don't know yet, but I suppose the usual suspects will eventually be fingered. I hope it wasn't the IRA. I don't know why that should be important, but I do hope it wasn't. By the sound of things, though, this was too well-co-ordinated to be the IRA. No offence (please don't shoot me and dump me in a ditch) but it's too big. News is just coming in that there have been some kind of problems in Brighton and Swindon, that the stations are closed. Now is when I realise how small Britain is! How easy it would be to wipe us out by accident just to, say, provide a diversion to get at Gleneagles?

In case you don't know, London's Underground is the deepest in the world. I can imagine, all too clearly, how terrifying it would be down there in those old, old tunnels; I'm used to the Paris Metro, and Brussels with it's trams. I get freaked out going down the seemingly endless stairs into the horrible hundred-times-breathed-in-and-out air; my very mild claustrophobia cranks up to a serious psychological problem on a crowded Tube. Those poor people.

Poor London. I wonder how could I have lived to see this; weren't New York and Madrid enough? Why didn't we learn the very simple lesson that this is a war which can never be won by military action; how can you fight someone who's set out to die in a suicide bombing? What can you threaten him with? Oh, here we go - "Arab sources who monitor Al-Qaeda etc." Who else? Well, we've always known it was "when" rather than "if". In Madrid Al-Qaeda directly affected the result of a democratic European election for the first time; a few nutters with semtex underwear and you influence Spanish foreign policy for years. I half-expected something around the time of our election, but evidently Al-Qaeda decided that the G8 was more important.