My last day at work

Well, well: What a drama.
I say drama, but most people – the media excluded – I saw or know took the events of Thursday morning with a large shrug. It might have helped that I had spoken to The Girlfriend just after the tube was shut down, so I wasn’t too worried: she was bitching about the bloody network; I was bitching about what a good advert this was the day after we’d won the games. Of course, we’d (all) been told that it was a power surge closing down the system, and everyone was searching alternative methods for getting to work. After 30 minutes waiting for a train into Liverpool Street, I was informed by RealSister that there had been a bomb at King’s Cross (the mobile network was holding up pretty well at this point), and then by the platform staff that no trains would be running ‘for the next hour or so’. So I tried the bus, until I was informed that no buses were going to central London.
I walked home, two and a half hours after I had left it, stopping in Curry’s on the way home to see the news. It was obvious at this point that it was rather big. Nobody was particularly put out, however. Most were still concerned with phoning the office or trying to make their way in.
What followed was a triumph of sensationalist news-casting and sensible humanity. All the news channels, and subsequently the papers, were giving it large: Drama; Tragedy; OhMiGod; Fear. Except, of course, that the pictures they were showing showed none of these (bar the images of the bus and the dead). The majority of the people in the pictures – hell, the majority of those involved directly in the incidents – weren’t looking shocked or scared or frantic. No, people were just getting on with it.
Interviewers tried their best to get an overblown emotional response from victims. They didn’t get it; instead, people who were within an inch of death were matter of fact, calm and rational. No doubt they were scared. No doubt they had witnessed atrocities few of us could imagine, but they didn’t lose their resolve.
Unlike the TV stations, who seemed to lose all sense of perspective, desperate for some emotional poster-boy or -girl to give a ‘real face’ to the story. Instead, they had to follow up with stories about how London is unbowed and will go on regardless. Well, how about getting out of our fucking faces and letting us.
Rolling news is almost always abysmal. Yes, it’s there when the story breaks, but when you haven’t had any new information for hours, it descends into cliché and desperation. Which it did rapidly. Why not just tell us what happened, and what is being done. Leave out the ‘human interest’; leave the victims alone. Starve the terrorists of publicity. And for fuck’s sake, let us get on with it; leave those unfortunate to grieve, in peace.

Personally, I got a couple of days off (the police asked me to stay out of the centre, and I always do as they ask). The Girlfriend discovered that the Piccadilly Line bomb was on the carriage of the train she normally gets, at the time she is normally on it (who says laziness leads to an unfulfilling life), but we aren’t taking part in What Ifs. A temporal gap is as good as being miles away (as she was, in Finsbury Park). We’ve been expecting this for years, and (as insensitive it is to say it when so many are mourning), 50 dead out of three million passengers a day is fair odds.
The best thing, though, was the phone calls from friends and family; people who you wouldn’t expect to be thinking about you. It makes you feel loved, really.