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ellarienSigh.
I'm glad that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
brisingamen and her peake are safe, and mrissa and her travelling companions. This morning I fired off e-mails to my old boss, whose wife and child are still in London, and my contact at the church I used to attend there, and everyone there is OK too. So, I'm fairly sure that I'm not personally touched by this morning's tragic and horrible events, even indirectly.
I'm still wobbly and near-tearful, though better after having -- instead of my usual iced coffee -- a cup of tea this afternoon. (At our favourite coffee place, they make it by squirting the almost-boiling water from the espresso machine over the teabag into a giant cup, which isn't exactly canonical but works fairly well.)
I lived in London for nearly three years. I didn't particularly like it, but I was quite familiar with the tube system; my daily commute was a ten-minute walk, but the tube took me across the city to church and into the West End to shop and enjoy the museums. My local station was Bethnal Green, one stop east of Liverpool Street on the Central line; one of the entrances has a memorial plaque over the steps for an appallingly large number of people who died while sheltering in the station during a WW2 air raid. I knew older people who had lived through the Blitz and still flinched a little when a warplane flew overhead; there was an older gentleman at my church who had lost his first fiancee to a German bomb and married her sister. I've seen the shrapnel scars in Cleopatra's Needle from a WW1 air raid. (My home town didn't escape either, and has an ugly 1950s concrete center to show for it, but London had it far worse.)
I was working late in my office on the Mile End Road when the 1996 Canary Wharf bomb shattered the IRA ceasefire; the blast rattled my office window and startled a cloud of pigeons into the evening sky, but I hadn't a clue what had happened until I got home and turned on the news. Other bombings followed, and for months there seemed to be a security alert somewhere on the tube system every time I used it. In the end, part of the reason I was so glad to get away was that I was so tired of being scared all the time -- not just by the bombings, but by the purse-snatch/mugging a month later that had me jumping at shadows for at least a year. I'm not brave enough to be a Londoner, and I salute those who are.
I'd been planning to get up early this morning and call my mother to have her schedule a visa appointment for me at the US embassy in London. The getting up part wasn't too hard, once it sank in what the NPR announcers were wittering about, but the calling ... I tried once, got a busy signal of the can't-get-an-international-line variety, and decided not to keep trying right then. I hope by Saturday things will have settled, and we can have a proper conversation. I don't want to let the stupid terrorists keep me from my holiday and my month of working in my home town. Spending a couple of days in central London is an inescapable part of that, as I'll need my new visa to come back here. I did it last year, blithely zooming around on the tube -- I'd have used Edgeware Road station, I think, if the Circle Line hadn't been having some kind of technical problem that day -- and visiting the British Museum and the National Gallery before catching the train home from Kings Cross. This year ... well, there's no reason to believe that by the end of next month it'll be any more dangerous than usual, though it may be a little less convenient. I'm still a little nervous about it. As I said, I'm not cut out to be a Londoner.
I'm glad that
brisingamen and her peake are safe, and mrissa and her travelling companions. This morning I fired off e-mails to my old boss, whose wife and child are still in London, and my contact at the church I used to attend there, and everyone there is OK too. So, I'm fairly sure that I'm not personally touched by this morning's tragic and horrible events, even indirectly.I'm still wobbly and near-tearful, though better after having -- instead of my usual iced coffee -- a cup of tea this afternoon. (At our favourite coffee place, they make it by squirting the almost-boiling water from the espresso machine over the teabag into a giant cup, which isn't exactly canonical but works fairly well.)
I lived in London for nearly three years. I didn't particularly like it, but I was quite familiar with the tube system; my daily commute was a ten-minute walk, but the tube took me across the city to church and into the West End to shop and enjoy the museums. My local station was Bethnal Green, one stop east of Liverpool Street on the Central line; one of the entrances has a memorial plaque over the steps for an appallingly large number of people who died while sheltering in the station during a WW2 air raid. I knew older people who had lived through the Blitz and still flinched a little when a warplane flew overhead; there was an older gentleman at my church who had lost his first fiancee to a German bomb and married her sister. I've seen the shrapnel scars in Cleopatra's Needle from a WW1 air raid. (My home town didn't escape either, and has an ugly 1950s concrete center to show for it, but London had it far worse.)
I was working late in my office on the Mile End Road when the 1996 Canary Wharf bomb shattered the IRA ceasefire; the blast rattled my office window and startled a cloud of pigeons into the evening sky, but I hadn't a clue what had happened until I got home and turned on the news. Other bombings followed, and for months there seemed to be a security alert somewhere on the tube system every time I used it. In the end, part of the reason I was so glad to get away was that I was so tired of being scared all the time -- not just by the bombings, but by the purse-snatch/mugging a month later that had me jumping at shadows for at least a year. I'm not brave enough to be a Londoner, and I salute those who are.
I'd been planning to get up early this morning and call my mother to have her schedule a visa appointment for me at the US embassy in London. The getting up part wasn't too hard, once it sank in what the NPR announcers were wittering about, but the calling ... I tried once, got a busy signal of the can't-get-an-international-line variety, and decided not to keep trying right then. I hope by Saturday things will have settled, and we can have a proper conversation. I don't want to let the stupid terrorists keep me from my holiday and my month of working in my home town. Spending a couple of days in central London is an inescapable part of that, as I'll need my new visa to come back here. I did it last year, blithely zooming around on the tube -- I'd have used Edgeware Road station, I think, if the Circle Line hadn't been having some kind of technical problem that day -- and visiting the British Museum and the National Gallery before catching the train home from Kings Cross. This year ... well, there's no reason to believe that by the end of next month it'll be any more dangerous than usual, though it may be a little less convenient. I'm still a little nervous about it. As I said, I'm not cut out to be a Londoner.
