(additions in typescript 14, 15, 26 july)

it's like a ghost town, said a reporter, i can hear people speaking across the road - for already there were streets where all traffic had stopped and people were walking...

amidst confused and contradictory reports one voice said that this was the first suicide bombing in the UK...

i was finding it difficult to react to the scale and the horror of it...

initially i felt it was unreal...

but my mood changed rapidly as i listened...

someone said there were 7 explosions...

another said there were 4 - but survivors from each underground train line could be emerging from two stations...

as i realised what was happening a great sadness came over me...

and then i began to sympathise with people in Israel, Iraq, and other places attacked by suicide bombers...

and i could for the first time share the reactions of fighters in all kinds of war who are driven by anger to think of their enemies as sub-human...

a website claimed that Al Quaeda was responsible but no one knew if this was the truth...

That is my first thought after my initially bewildering (and then sad, and then angry) feelings in this day of the first global attack on London... a consequence, surely, of the attacks on Iraq and elsewhere - all such attacks being terrible for the people who suffer them.

[On second thoughts i suspect that the trench warfare with machine guns and poison gas, the submarine attacks, the bombing raids, the rocket attacks, the atomic bomb raids, and the genocides in World Wars 1 and 2 were the start of this - the remorseless killing of both soldiers and civillians in large numbers as soon as new technologies made this possible - along with the discarding of chivalry, of the Sermon on the Mount, of international law, or of any other morality or religion that might limit or prohibit the industrialisation of warfare.]

But those previous uses of industrialised weapons were all controlled by governments. Bombings by terrorists of people put into dangerous assemblies in tall buildings or in underground trains, and people who are willing to kill themselves in the process, are something different...

[Could this be the first (negative) manifestation of an historical shift to the (positive) replacement of centralised government by the decentralised power and responsibility of everyone (made possible by the existence of computernets and other new technologies)?... yes, i think it is possible that we, or our descendents, can be the first people to live with individual global power and without government... this may seem a frightening possibility but it is also a trustful one.]

Once i realised what was happening i spent all day listening to the continuous reports on radio and in trying (via over-loaded phone lines) to ask others if they are safe or tell them that i am... But now, the attack seeming to be over, i am trying to write something here while the memory of it is strong (and to not let this horrible event stop me).

Having heard or seen much of what happened, by radio or web, the item that remains in my thoughts is this phrase from the account of someone who was seeing

'people walk like walking buses'

...what struck me, amidst the killing and fear and sadness, was the poetic beauty, the originality, of this person's use of words (from the BBC's web page of reports by people witnessing what was happening).

but now to sleep (01:40)

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atlas

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