There's nothing to see here

I never commented on the London incidents because there was so much going on in my life at that particular moment. It doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about it. Quite the contrary, when I woke up to the news the first thing I did was to contact all my friends that live and work in and around London to check that they were ok.

Fortunately, all of them were - but there were far too many close calls for my comfort. One was in a train coming to Liverpool Station when the bomb there went off, another one was at King's Cross when the Russell Square bomb went off and was stuck in a tube with the electricity cut off. Someone who uses the Circle line daily just by accident had gone to work an hour early. And numerous other stories like that that made my heart skip a beat.

After the initial panic and getting the good news, the actual news really sank in. It wasn't a surprise, as such - it was always known that London was a big target - but the fact that it had actually now happened. The perpetrators claim to have links to al-Qaeda, I don't think it necessarily means they were close pals with Osama. Accoring to reports, they seem to be totally ordinary men who just for some reason decided to embark on a mission of mass murder. They could have made the bombs ten times more powerful but chose not to.

In many ways the hysteria was felt much more in US than it was in UK - when the news came through I was trying to get the news on TV, but none of the Canadian channels had deviated from their normal schedules and were showing the normal daytime crap. Whereas all the US channels - and we get quite a few local channels from pretty much all the states in West Coast and North-West - where all showing nothing but news of the "London Terror Attacks" (and Canadian channels called them "London Attacks" in their scheduled news). LA was set to state of high security although they admitted they had no evidence to support it.

But the terrorists chose the wrong target. If you want to cause hysteria, US is a good place - Brits, especially in London, are not as easy targets. London emergency services have been practicing this not only for the past four years since 9/11 but for the past 30 years with IRA, and if you want to go further back than that, London has been under attack quite a few times in the last two thousand years. People of London have suffered though the Blitz and through IRA years - yes, a new attack is always going to be a shock, but it's nothing they can't deal with. London was up and running the next day, and back to pretty much normal in couple of days after that.

Brits are stubborn and proud people, always have been. They handle these kind of issues with dignity - they might not take very well to newfangled things like Mad Cow Decease or Euro, but if it's an enemy attacking you - no problem, after all the ancestors in Agincourt did it. I'm not trying to be flippant about it, I really belive that Brits have that stoic resolve and courage about them that not many nations seem to have these days, and that I'm really proud of them.

No matter what they do, UK wont let them win this war on intimidation. Good for them.

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