--- Paula <pmg@gmx.co.uk> wrote:
I'm in London about half a mile from the Aldgate bomb and less than 5 miles from all of the blasts. Think my nerves must have got rather blunted having gone through the pretty incessant bombing in the IRA campaign of the 70s and 80s - <snip>
There's certainly a bit of shock around - more from those outside of central London, in the suburbs and beyond - at the scale of the blasts, and the disruption. Some hysteria and panic, of course, and a lot of confusion this morning. And around here the various emergency vehicles have been tearing around with sirens going (whether or not it's necessary - with open and lightly trafficked roads, it really isn't necessary, is it?) all afternoon. I was walking across the River Thames to work in Southwark, not far from Waterloo, Tate Modern, and the Globe Theatre, about the time the bombs were going off, but knew nothing about it until mid to late morning when a caller mentioned some problems on the Underground and wondered if I'd been affected. Maybe there is a sense of being a little used to this. I remember being at home in Covent Garden in the early/mid '70s with the IRA Christmas bombing campaign going off in the night around us. And my mother, who had lived just off Leicester Square through WWII, working as a nurse, remarked with a great deal of calm (equanimity? sang froid?) that it was a little like living through the Blitz. There was chaos and confusion - and variously between four and seven bombs reported, although the main reports were about the power surge simulatneously affecting 5 or 6 Underground stations. Access to mobile networks and news web sites was intermittent - in fact for much of the late morning I could only get cnn.com or abc in Australia. CNN was reporting bomb explosions way before the BBC started mentioning this as a possibility. We have survived worse, much worse, and it pales in comparision with the tsunami, or the World Trade Center, the Madrid devastations, or the last big earthquake in the Bay area. I don't think it's a matter of being insensitive, or having blunted nerves - I was calling around and e-mailing to ensure family and friends were not caught up - but being a bit more measured and considered. For those directly involved it is another matter, and until you are it is difficult to really comprehend that. Dominic Pinto e-m dominic.pinto@ieee.org M: +44 780 302-8268 Ph/Fax: +44 207 379-8341