"And then he said..." - July 8th, 2005 [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
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July 8th, 2005

London Pride [Jul. 8th, 2005|01:57 am]
London Pride beer - drink deep, folks
Drink deep, folks

Some of the best of the blogs today:

Make My Vote Count: Being British is Great

We did not panic, we did not crumble. We did not burst into irrational fits of anger and go rushing out looking for a scapegoat, a religious group to lynch or a country to bomb. We decamped to the pubs and took the rest of the day off.

We showed the world how to industrialise, how to play cricket and now we're showing them how to cope in a crisis.

For all of this we should be very, very proud.

Skip's Acorn Treasury: Inspector Fenner

"Will Inspector Fenner please report to the office" they said over the intercom at Euston.

"Oh," said my flatmate who knows all things. "That's a call sign, you know."

The sirens went off, and they swept us out of the station.

And then there was a very gentle boom.

The London News Review: A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

Gia's Blog: Londoners Rule

We are not terrorised.

We are just annoyed.

The Germans tried to terrorise Londoners for 40 nights. Londoners just camped out in the Tube singing songs.

The IRA tried to terrorise the British for decades. The British just used the destruction of buildings as unplanned town planning and revamped their bombed cities.

Now these amateurs think they can scare us by messing up the transport system? Bah. We're just pissed off that we can't meet our friend for coffee in the West End.

Piss off, terrorists. Go pick on someone who gives a shit.... You'll get the reaction you want from Americans. Try them again.*

* not really, obviously

And from the same blog, again:

Gia's Blog: Terror Alert Level: More Beer!

People died today. That's a terrible thing for their families, most certainly. But didn't you kids learn anything last weekend? I mean at least we don't have 50,000 people dying every day here, you know? Jesus, the NHS certainly wouldn't be able to cope with that. And, gosh, I wonder if Iraqis will think what happened in London today is worth even noticing? Get some perspective.

Oh, but Gia, you seem so uncaring, so heartless, people died today blahblahblah...

For a relatively small number of people today was an awful day. I understand that. But every day is the last day of someone's life. Does that mean that the rest of us have to stop living? Of course it doesn't. That is what being a Londoner is all about- just getting on with what you want to do and not letting anyone or anything get in your way.

So, relax, all you non-Brits, let us deal with this. Sit down, have a nice cuppa tea, everything will be fine.

And what about the Olympics, eh? Brilliant. Bloody brilliant.

Bourbon creme?

Pfff: Surviving a Terrorist Attack

The train left the tracks and started to rumble down the tunnel. It was incapable of stopping and just rolled on. A series of explosions followed as if tube electric motor after motor was exploding. Each explosion shook the train in the air and seems to make it land at a lower point.

I fell to the ground like most people, scrunched up in a ball in minimize injury. At this point I wondered if the train would ever stop, I thought "please make it stop", but it kept going. In the end I just wished that it didn't hit something and crush. It didn't.

Europhobia: London Tube Explosions

Cheers for the messages of support. London's grateful. And we're going to keep our heads. Stiff upper lip and all that - wouldn't do to get all emotional. Hardly British - and if we stop being British about it, the bastards have won. So we'll have a few beers, make as many sick jokes about it in pubs up and down the land as we can, and get on with our lives as normal. Other than causing the grief of too many innocent people, these cunts will have achieved precisely fuck all. We shall not be moved.

Non-trivial solutions: An open letter

To the terrorist cunts who tried to kill me today:

Fuck you. You missed me. Better luck next time.

LinkPoint of Order, Mr Speaker!

Upon mature reflection [Jul. 8th, 2005|02:52 am]
Having plundered other people's thoughts on the bombings and posted them here, I thought I'd see if I could develop mine beyond my initial 'Blitz Spirit, you can't beat a Londoner with bombs' reaction.

And right now I'm thinking: "Is that it?"

Since September 11th all the doom-laden experts and the politicians have been telling us 'one day they'll come for us'. And the promise has been that the streets will run with blood and the city will burn and we will all rend our clothes and tear our hair in lamentation because the fury of the terrorist will be awful to behold.

Well, arseholes to that. Right now the only possible reaction is to laugh and ask al-Quaeda; "Is that your best shot?"

Because today was pathetic. Feeble. A damp squib.

Of course, it was a tragedy for three or four dozen families. But in world terrorism terms it wasn't a bang, it was a whimper.

When September 11th happened, we were a lot of things. We were appalled. We were disgusted. We were gutted for America. And we were - reluctantly - impressed. We thought we knew terrorism, from the IRA. But in a stroke, September 11th made the Provos look like amateurs. Using passenger aircraft as weapons to wipe out world-famous landmarks was such a leap of imagination that it reset the bar for terrorism.

As soon as Tony Blair decided to drag us into the Iraq war, we knew we'd get hit eventually. We put the thought to the back of our heads and sneered at the politicians and journalists as they flapped and scaremongered, because you'd go nuts if you dwelled on it every day, but we knew one day London would be a target.

And that was scary, because with the bar so high after September 11th, what form would the attack take? How many would die? Which of London's landmarks would no longer be there when the dust settled?

But now it's happened. A co-ordinated set of attacks across the city at peak rush hour. And hey - it wasn't so bad. The bar got lowered again, the creative imagination of evil had packed up and gone home. Everyone from Irish Republicans to homophobic, racist nailbombers, to Austrian-born dictators, have hit the city with explosives, and most of 'em hit it harder than this lot of sad cases. We're kind of used to it. It doesn't impress us, scare us, or particularly bother us.

Sure, the politicians will pontificate - as soon as he thinks he can get away with it, Tony Blair will try to use the attack to advance his anti-civil liberties agenda, but he may find it backfires as it's obvious that ID cards wouldn't have stopped this. And the media will churn out their breathless prose and wave their arms excitedly, because they've known since September 11th how they were going to report this, and never mind how bad the incident actually is. And as a former politician and ex-journalist, I understand why they're doing what they're doing. And I also understand how ordinary Londoners won't be taking a lot of notice of them.

This is our city, and we won't be told how to live in it. Not by fanatical zealots who think we should be suffering for our leaders' sins, not by hawkish neo-Conservatives who think we should be thirsting for bloody revenge, not by sentiment-fuelled journalists who think we should treat this like the second death of Diana, and not by agenda-driven politicians who want us to see the world through the filter of their narrow-minded, prescriptive 'solutions'.

This is London. We do it our way.

And if you don't like it, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.
Link1 intervention|Point of Order, Mr Speaker!

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