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.