London bombings

A couple of days after every other person on the planet has blogged this.

I was "lucky" enough to be watching TV when the breaking news came on, and I sat and stared for 2 hours, in shock initially (though in the cold light of day it was no surprise) and then as no real news came in I went to bed about 11.30 PM, about 12.30 PM London time.

It was a weird feeling watching the news, I watched 9/11, the aftermath of the Madrid bombing, the tsunami disaster in Indonesia/Sri Lanka etc and for each of those I felt for the people were injured the families of those who died and of those who were missing. With the London bombing there was more, even though I am 19,000 km's away from London, I am still English, I was born in the outer 'burbs of London - sort of. Though I have lived here for 30 years and have a NZ passport I still feel English. After spending a couple of years in London in the mid-eighties, I knew all the streets, the squares, the stations, I recognised bus numbers as they drove past, I have no idea why I remembered them, but I did.

The thing that really amazed me as I watched this live on TV, apart from the fact I was watching it live on TV, was how calm everyone was, the images from NY after 9/11 were full of a screaming and running chaos whereas in London it was so quite, maybe the scale was different.

At work on Friday we talked about the bombings and someone said that they could not understand why the bombers only did 4 small bombs and compared to 9/11 it was all quite minor. Well I disagreed I believe 4 small bombs was enough, it brought the Underground and the Red London buses to a stand still. These are major British icons, the underground is a bigger icon than the WTC, yes the death toll was less but the message was the same.