I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink

I've been debating whether or not to post anything about the whole London bombing incident. On the one hand, what on earth could I possibly add to the discourse? On the other hand, well, this is my blog and I get to blather about whatever the hell I want, so...

The only reason I've got anything other than condolences to add is that it's London. The DH and I spent a semester there as undergrads (Fall '98) - it's where we started "dating," in fact - and we went back there for spring break our senior year, so I do feel some attachment to the city. For a while, I was a Londoner. Put it this way: I know the tube better than I know the NYC subway system. While we were there, the DH and I spent a lot of time just riding around on the trains. We were broke students, and our tube passes allowed us virtually unlimited rides for way cheap. We rode all the way out to the ends of a couple of the lines, way out in suburban London, where no tourists ever have reason to go. We rode on every single tube line at least once, even the weirdo Waterloo & City Line, which only goes between Waterloo and Bank stations. We went to the London Transport Museum a ton of times. We were tube geeks (much like the straphangers of the NYC subway system).

So when I heard about the attacks, I didn't have to go online to see which trains had been hit. I knew that it's the Piccadilly Line that runs between King's Cross and Russell Square. And I could glance up at the framed poster of the tube map that's on our living room wall to see that Edgeware Road and Liverpool Street are both on the infernal Circle Line (which I particularly disliked because you always had to wait for-freaking-ever for a train). And where the bus exploded? Our hotel on that spring break trip was about one block away from that site. (And from the pictures, I can tell you that it was a newer bus that was destroyed. It's the tiniest shred of comfort to me that at least the bastards didn't get one of the trusty old Routemasters.) I know the Russell Square tube station is the closest one to that place, and I know you have to take a rather small elevator down to the platform there instead of the usual escalator, because the Piccadilly Line runs so deep underground (and besides, the station is too tiny to accomodate an escalator, even if they wanted to put one in). I know how absolutely jam-packed the Piccadilly Line trains are at rush hour - and, in a way, I bet that actually helped keep the casualty count relatively low, as the people closest to the blast would have shielded those a little farther away from much of the impact. I have to keep stopping myself from imagining how terrifying it must have been to be crammed into one of those cars, being plunged into darkness, and then being trapped while the car filled with smoke. There's a memorial plaque in King's Cross commemorating a terrible tube fire from, like, 1986 or so, in which a number of people died. Allegedly they've made the tube much more fire-proof since then, but really, there's only so much they can do, y'know? I know that's what would've been crossing my mind, if I'd been on that train.

So what do all these details add up to? I don't know. I keep reading all the stories online, as if knowing all about when and how it happened will somehow make the "why" fall into place. It's just never going to make sense.

Here's the stuff I've been reading:

• The BBC coverage


• The Guardian's Special Report section, and its terrorism threat article archive


• CNN's special site


• and I've been listening to the NPR coverage almost non-stop, but I listen to NPR almost non-stop anyway, so that's nothing unusual for me.

The one bit of good news I did get out of this is that my friend Sam, who lives in London, is alright. I hadn't been in touch with him in years, but I dug through the deepest depths of my address book and found a few e-mail addresses for him and tried them all. He's still in London, but he was already at work by the time things started happening, so he's fine. It's good to be back in touch with him again. I still haven't heard anything from my relatives in England, but none of them live in London, so I'm not so worried there.

Well, once again, I hadn't meant to post so much, but I guess I just had to get all that out. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I promise a quickie, frivolous post is coming soon.