Bad News

I feel bad.
Life has me working very hard at the moment, so I'm only just catching up on my reading. I've checked a lot of blogs in the last half hour or so; accounts of the events in London on Thursday have left me scared, proud, upset and thankful that matters were not worse.

My condolences to the relatives of the dead, and my sympathy to those who were injured. To everyone who was in London on Thursday, you have my respect and awe.

Krissa and I do not watch television in the mornings - but as I sat down at my desk in the office my phone rang and she told me about the bombs. My reaction was dull, like the information wasn't real, or couldn't apply to the real world. That couldn't be London London. Not the London.

9am in New York is 2pm in London.

I checked my email and a few people had thoughtfully emailed me to say that different groups of friends had already checked in...I sent a frantic flurry of emails, and to my relief responses began to trickle back.

The distance -in time as well as miles- made the wait to hear from people harder. My immediate family live on the Isle of Wight, but there are so many people I know, or have known, and all I really know about them and what they do now is that they live and work in London.

When the news reports of bomb blasts appeared on television when I was a child, during the era of frequent IRA blasts, I had a sense of detachment - everyone I knew and loved lived on the Isle of Wight. We were detached, in a very real way. Our little mile-wide moat meant that scary real-world things like explosions happened elsewhere. Scenes of blocked off streets, windowless cars, bright sugar-cubes of broken glass scattered across black tarmac...none of it was real.
Island mentality is hard to explain. While I know my way around the Island like nowhere else, The Mainland was an other-where. A place apart. There was the Island, and there was The Mainland, and in a lot of ways, the rest of the world was packaged up in the same box as the concept of The Mainland - an unknown arena, known only through short visits and the pinhole of the media.

So when Krissa told me the news, part of me didn't really take it in. Like news from distant lands, there is concern but no connection, no sting of association. The picture of the bus after the blast was a shock akin to a slap in the face.
That's my distant land...oh my god. Oh my god.
Whenever I see a picture from the UK it feels strange. After so long in the US little things like road signs and cars can be strong reminders of just how different New York is to London, even if I have gotten used to New York. The long strip of red metal panelling hanging off at an obscenely shocked angle..the black cab, the speed limit sign. As the recognition sparked the feelings of recognising home...the reality of it all swang in and sickened me.

I have friends there.

I am glad you are okay. Really, genuinely I am happy and relieved that you're all all right, and it is terrible that something like these bombs is what has made me get in touch with a lot of people I hadn't contacted in ages.

Politics...I'm not a political person. I like not being a political person. It's easier than being avidly political, for example, and I'm wondering if that's why I'm laid back about it all. I have my views. Maybe I ought to start thinking about them and expressing them.
Not right now, mind.
All I can say is...no. This is wrong. No cause worth living for is worth killing for.

It seems that tonight...not long ago as I write, Birmingham city centre was evacuated of 30,000 people and four controlled explosions were carried out. It's not clear if there were any devices; authorities are saying that they were just suspicious packages.
Apparently, despite the seriousness of the possibility of blasts, people took their drinks with them as they were evacuated...doing the conga past armed police.

I'm not sure this is a social statement you can apply purely to Britain's reaction to the bombings, because it's a Saturday night in Birmingham, but still.