the_happy_pig

Holy fuck!!!

That was not good. I started today a little late for work, just minding my own business, when I get a phone call from one of my workmates, she works in London. She asks me if I've heard.

'Heard what?' I ask. Then she tells me about trains blowing up due to an electrical 'surge' and then about a bus blowing up. The boss phoned her and told her to high tail it out of London. I checked the news on the radio, it was all panicked press conferences, no one knew what ws happening. 'There have been some explosions' one guy on the radio said, he gave no more information, except that it was in central London. I silently gave thanks to the fact that all my family had long since left London, then a pang struck me right in the gut, Ben! Ben is one of my best friends, who left here to go to London to get work as a professional drummer, he recently got himself a great flat with his girlfriend in central London. I phoned, but to no avail (all the mobile networks in London had been closed down) I did get his voicemail, so I left a message (with barely disguised panic in my voice) asking if he was ok, and to get in touch. Fortunately, he's just got in touch and told me both he and his girlfriend are safe and fine.

Although not anywhere near the scale of 9/11, it made me think back about it. My friend Kev and his girlfriend had booked a holiday in NYC, and landed on the 8th, I remember getting home from work in time to see the plane crash into the second tower, and all I could think of was my friend over there.

I don't know why todays events affected me so much, I knew the likelyhood of Ben even being out of bed at that time were incredibly slim. And I remember vividly the rain of terror caused by the IRA in the eighties, whose scale and ferocity outmatched what happened today.

But lastly, I went to a place in Plymouth, and the security guard in the store made a passing comment about the fact that we were fortunate not to be in London, I agreed. Then he said,
'We should just round them all up' To which, I replied,
'But the problem is finding them though isn't it?'
He then looked at me in complete seriousness, and said,
'Well, it's anyone with a towel on their head and a beard isn't it'

I think I may have insulted him by just walking away. But I can't believe that he thought this was a justified attitude, and what scares me more is the fact that hundreds of thousands of other people are going to feel the same way. I have little faith that my fellow countymen are going to be able to see beyond this stereotype. And I fear for the repercussions on other innocent countrymen.

I pray I'm wrong, but our yob culture has grown to such an extent that they won't be able to tell the difference between Muslim, Sikh or Hindu. And someone is going to stand publicly and bay for blood.