A day I spent in mostly impotent horror, being stuck in Edinburgh watching coverage of the ongoing situation in London. Once the initial fears that family or friends were caught up in the carnage were allayed, the day turned into a grim spectator sport; all the while, my feelings turned from horror to anger, the thought of you bombed my home city, you fuckers. The consolation that, in terms of casualties, this was not quite another Madrid or Bali is some salvation, but it still doesn’t quite salve the (admittedly, utterly selfish) personal anger I felt at my home town being attacked.

I was touched by the immediate reaction of some - Blair’s speech said some of the right things, Brian Paddick of the Met gave an excellent press conference, but the best words of the day came from Ken Livingstone in Singapore. Meanwhile Adam Ingram and George Galloway decided to descend to a pathetic slanging match in the House of Commons - neither MP I held in much regard anyway, but it was still immensely distasteful.

Unlike so many other horrors, there’s been an extraordinary amount of detail recorded straight away, from a wide range of correspondents. The liveblogging of the event, from the Guardian, The London Line, Londonist, Going Underground (Update: and perfect.co.uk and Europhobia, while Shot By Both Sides does a good job of picking off moronic opinions), as well as the additions to the Flickr photo pool and the evolution of the Wikipedia article about the attacks, better capture the flow of the day’s events - from initial confusion, to horror, to reflection and defiance. The marking of rumours and hoaxes (particularly the ones of suicide bombers in Canary Wharf) will probably be excised from the more polished ‘official’ accounts in the newspapers and mainstream media (the TV coverage is already resorting to hackneyed clichés and death-by-analysis). The personal hints and touches in people’s accounts add much-needed detail and colour (including, perhaps in my case, my own misguided and confused first feelings), which should be remembered and considered when recounting this horror in the days, months and years to come.

Ack, I’m probably going into bollocks mode, so I’ll stop. While some of my colleagues on the Line are defiantly off to the pub and a curry, as I’m on my own up here, I’m going to reflect and count my blessings over some comfort food. For now, that’s all…

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 21:53:37 and is filed under General.