I suppose, when there can be no words, words will have to do.

Today London is a very strange and scary place to be.

My office is five minutes from Liverpool Street, two minutes from Old Street. Nowhere in Central London is very far away from anywhere else, or at least that's what it feels like today. The sensation of hearing the sirens on the television, and then walking a few steps and listening to the same sirens wailing through the windows is terrifying and pervasive.

This morning I walked into London Bridge tube station only to be confronted with an ocean of black suited people, all trying in vain to board the tube and be whisked off to work, none of us understanding the disruption in our routines. When there are delays in public transport, you can clearly pick out the patient 'it's out of my hands' people, and differentiate them quickly from the angry, impatient people who push, shove and battle their way through the immense crowds as if the ocean should part immediately for them. I'm not sure whether this is something I have since imagined, but I think the atmosphere had been altered this morning. There were less of the latter people, there was less impatience and frustrated anger, but simultaneously there was less understanding of the cause of the delay. Confusion reigned supreme.

Confusion still reigns, I suppose.

I got on a bus outside London Bridge, heading up to Liverpool Street. As we rode along we passed endless streams of people, all dressed in what in retrospect seems like funereal black, when in fact, of course, it was just the dark uniform of the city worker. Trooping across the bridge, the staunch resolution to get to work seemed to transform each individual to just one tiny part of a pulsating mass, focused and unerring.
By the time we were nearing Liverpool Street, the atmosphere had thickened, there were more people on the pavements. The roads were blocked, and knowing that Liverpool Street was less than five minutes walk away, I and most of the other passenges got off the bus. Snippets of conversation on the pavement. Fleeting words caught but left unexplained. Explosion. Terrorists. Bomb.

Walking two hundred metres up the road I could see the fluorescence of the many police officers' jackets flashing through the Thursday morning drizzle and contrasting starkly against the looming grey towers of Central London. The areas cordoned off seemed almost randomly selected, and as streams of people drifted in and out policemen would walk up and with a light touch on the arm guide them out, deflecting questions as they moved on to the next misguided individual.


There have been three/four/nobody knows exactly how many bombs. Nobody knew where I was. It was a small explosion, or a power surge. There was nobody saying all of of this. I walked to work. People were walking in the roads, huddled with strangers frantically questioning and giving each other answers based on conjecture or rumour. There were policemen with sniffer dogs and sombre expressions patrolling the streets. Small groups collected worriedly outside offices, sharing cigarettes and wiping the rain from their pale faces.

It was, just to throw you with a wild understatement, strange.

Part of the strangeness is maybe derived from the fact that it feels like nobody knows quite what it is we're all so close to. There is this understated panic that nobody can really name, but that makes us all call our families and friends, and stare at strangers in the street, grateful they're alive.

I can still hear the helicopters overhead and the sirens echoing. Other than that, and the omnipresent television presenters' voices, the whole of London seems oddly quiet. In shock? In anticipation? Maybe we're all just holding our collective breath.

What a strange day to be in London.