Strange days

What a strange couple of days for London.

I was surprised yesterday by an unexpected strength of feeling about the Olympics announcement, a curious patriotic pride and triumph. I didn't expect us to win but when the announcement came I felt as if I was celebrating an almost personal victory, albeit a quietly-stated one.

Then today, it was with a calm shock that I listened to my year 8's talking about bombs in London. Surely not. But they wouldn't think to make up something like that, would they? I checked the news on my PC and was almost surprised to find out that it was true. I refused to panic or get excited and insisted that we continue with the lesson, despite cries to turn on the television in my lab. In continuing with normal life, I felt as if I was resisting, fighting back somehow. As I checked the BBC news I remember thinking, with a disconnected clarity, that the number of casualties seemed very low and surely there were a lot of gaps in the picture. I was on a split lunch lesson and when the bell came I rang home. Mum confirmed that everyone was fine and Bren had cycled to work in Hackney this morning.

She spoke, in a way I've heard repeated a few times this afternoon, (for example, on this digest of London blogs on the TimesOnline website) of the way in which Londoners would not be cowed by today's events and would go on regardless. As I spoke to her, I heard an echo of Blitz resilience come down from my Grandma, who speaks proudly yet frankly of the way in which Londoners went on with their lives as bombs dropped around them.

A blogger is quoted on the Times page saying:
"There is no other nation on earth that can absorb crisis with such calmness and professionalism as Britain..The terrorists’ anger towards us pales into insignificance with our determination to beat them. And we will."
Tony Blair echoed this determination in his speech which I saw repeated several times in the afternoon.

I feel so disconnected from events in London, and yet in me there's a strong pang of solidarity with my home city. I feel more like a Londoner than ever.
I'm finding it hard to picture familar places, like Liverpool Street station, closed and somehow defiled. The static familar images of my home seem violated, although I'm acknowledging in myself a lean towards the melodramatic here. Perhaps I'm overcompensating, because in some ways I'm struggling to feel anything, a sense of shock combined with distance has combined to give a slightly numb edge to my reflections.

In some ways, I'm trying not to imagine it.. I've spent too many hours in those packed underground carriages to want to picture being trapped down there in such confusion. On the other hand, stories of people making their way home across London this evening, an exodus by foot and boat, have the appeal of an adventure, of the making-do camaraderie that descends in such times. All in all, mixed feelings, or lack of. I feel a simultaneous need to talk about it yet not to brood on it, and there's lots to say, yet nothing really to add.