my name is mwd

This week was Cosener’s, so I was over in Oxfordshire Thursday/Friday. On the way there I passed through London, going from King’s Cross to Paddington in order to get the train to Didcot. I was fortunate to have a very uneventful trip, leaving Paddington as I did at 8.30 am, 20 minutes before the first bomb went off. It was very surreal when we heard the news - as we’d been there but an hour or two earlier, so it was hard to imagine that it was real.

Unlike the US, London kind of takes these things in it’s stride - I guess due to years of the IRA. When I passed back through London on Friday the underground was as busy as ever, and basically nothing much had changed for most people, though I imagine for those directly touched it’ll be a terrible time. The only visual change to London was the amount of media everywhere. I ended up walking past the area where the bus had been blown up, and all you could see was media vans with satellite dishes on. At King’s Cross it was the same - the floral reminders left by people were almost completely obscured by over a dozen photojournalists. The only change visible from Thursday’s attacks is that there’s now a media circus in parts of London.