July 7

A year ago I was driving Dave, Sam and a family friend Luke for a day out at the British Army Tank museum (a great place, incidently). The traffic was heavy, so I turned on the radio to get the traffic report. One of the first things we heard was that there had been multiple, unexplained, power surges on the London underground. Shortly afterwards it became clear that London had been the target of a terrorist attack. It wasn’t the first bomb attack on London, and unfortunately, it probably won’t be the last. There has been a lot of reflection on the attacks and their aftermath on the Internet today and I’d like to point out a couple of things which struck me as apposite.

Juan Cole wrote in his blog, referring to a video made by one of the bombers:

The young Briton, brainwashed by agents of Zawahiri, obviously did not understand his own country. The UK has never paid the slightest attention to such threats, and if he had wanted to reinforce the British public in the policies he mentioned, he could have found no better instrument to that purpose than to menace them with bombings.

Then there is Rachel from North London, a survivor of the Kings Cross bombing who keeps her own blog. Take a look at Rachel’s writing and you’ll get an insight into the British character that Juan Cole is talking about. I love the idea that the survivors meet up in a pub, it seems to capture something about our national approach to success or disaster.