"And then he said..."

Times of stress or empty cupboards in this house (as, I suspect, in most other houses) mean comfort eating and a take-away, or more accurately a delivery. And that, for us, usually means Domino's Pizza.

I spent a very odd summer as a pizza chef during my student years, working for Pizzaland. I don't claim to be an expert, or a connoisseur, but I know what I like and - although curries and Chinese have their place - what I like is round, with cheese and tomato sauce on top.

As life has changed for us, so has the experience - but not the instinct to reach for a large deep pan.

In the early post-university days of low wages, it was a case of counting the pennies to see what, if anything, we could afford. Later, as we got a bit more money, we'd go round and collect, sitting on uncomfortable plastic chairs watching the bustle in the kitchen. Eventually a Dominos opened in our home town and we'd phone for delivery, fielding baffled phone call from drivers who couldn't find our carefully hidden block of flats. Finally, luxury of luxuries, online ordering arrived and now we're even spared the confusion of explaining the address.

We're not spared the nervous anticipation of wondering whether the driver will be able to find us, though. Admittedly, most of them just follow the groove in the tarmac between their store and our flat, but the new ones still struggle. And none more so than the most recent one, a poor young lad from somewhere in the Slavic world who was in his first night on the job.

The phone rang at just about the time we were starting to get restless and impatient. A Bond-villain voice said “Hay-lo. I am tryink to find vere you liff.” In the background was the classic parpy-farty noise of an idling moped.

Now, I'll grant you it's not easy to find our flats. If you look on a map, we're just a name in the middle of a block of grey representing buildings - the access road isn't marked and the most obvious places where you'd expect to find it, if you went by the map alone, couldn't be more wrong.

We're actually down an obscure drive between a nursery playground and a churchyard, but the mad world-dominance plans of the loony vicar have involved removing one of the signs that tell you you're in the right place, and smashing the other so that it now reads only “R COURT”. Also, his hubris led him to install expensive copper lights along the drive, which were stolen within weeks. He replaced them, and the new ones were stolen in days. The drive has been dark ever since.

I explained this - apart from the bit about the vicar - to the delivery driver, and said that I'd come out and meet him if he still couldn't find us. Five minutes later he rang again: “I haff still not found you, I am very sorry”. I went out in search of him.

I walked down the drive, and there was no sign of a moped anywhere near it. Once I was out on the main road I looked to the left and the right, and listened carefully - my old Tufty Club training coming in handy yet again. Far in the distance was a faint buzzing and a red rear light. The driver was obviously circling the entrance to the next flats down the road in the hope they'd magically transform into mine. I phoned him and told him to head back along the road to where he'd find me.

The sound of the moped grew louder. I began to imagine I could smell the pizza. The sound grew quieter again, and the tail-light resumed its patrol around the other flats. Clearly the driver had not believed me when I said he should drive until he found me, and was now circling until I climbed down from whatever tree I was evidently hiding up. Either that or he'd got a nosebleed at the prospect of going so far west and had stopped to recover.

I rang him again, more tersely this time.

Again the engine noise approached, and I swear there was something disbelieving about its note, as if it feared it was being led into an ambush and would soon be leapt upon and carried off for spare parts. Which, in this part of London, is not wholly impossible.

I stepped into the middle of the road and began waving my arms in a manner instantly recognisable to anyone who has seen footage of flightdeck mateys guiding bombers down onto aircraft carriers. I prayed that this particular pizza pilot hadn't already jettisoned my deep pan over Baghdad. I wasn't sure I'd be responsible for the consequences.

He pulled up beside me and there was a moment's silence as we looked at each other. I was ready for a row if he'd tried to be bolshy about it. Instead he tugged off his crash helmet and it was, I'm afraid, something of a Diet Coke Break moment. Soulful dark eyes smiled out an embarrassed apology from under a shock of blue-black hair. Razor-sharp cheekbones cast interesting shadows in the gloom from the streetlights. When he told me in his thickly-accented English that it was his first time I found myself making reassuring noises and murmuring that he'd find it easier next time. He insisted on escorting me back to my flat, trundling along beside me on his moped as I walked. He had promised to deliver the pizza, and deliver it he surely would.

He would have come up the stairs to the door of my flat, but I relieved him of his burden at the ground floor entrance and sent him on his way, still apologising. Back upstairs, Beloved Other Half greeted me with the understandable grumpiness of someone who has been kept waiting far longer than is reasonable for her garlic bread. “He found you in the end, then?” she demanded.

“Don't be harsh on him,” I found myself saying as we ripped open the boxes with barely concealed pizza-lust. “It was his first night on the job.”

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Earlier this year I gave up work at the Independent, a newspaper I enjoyed working at and was proud to be a part of, and the main reason I gave it up was because of the speed cameras on the route. Sure, the wildly unsociable hours were a pretty big reason too - but I'd put up with them for nine months and could easily have put up with them for longer if need be.

No, the main reason was because I felt the cameras on the route were unfairly set up to catch drivers out, and having been caught a couple of times I was one away from a driving ban. Now, I actually strongly support the use of speed cameras to improve road safety, and I don't have any time for whingers who claim they “aren't fair” and they “make criminals out of ordinary drivers”. No they don't - they catch people who speed, which is illegal.

But they have to play fair - and the last time they caught me, I didn't think they had.

It was a 30mph zone which had suddenly and unexpectedly been lowered to 20mph - but I didn't know that, and at 3am on the way home from work one Saturday I went through at my normal speed and triggered a camera. I hadn't seen any signs, and I was the only car on the road so I had no-one else to compare myself with. The next time I went through, it was marked with more signs than a Big Brother eviction night - static signs, flashing electronic ones, the lot, as if someone official had noticed there weren't enough and had overcompensated. There was more traffic that night, and it was moving at a crawl. I was tempted to appeal against my notice, on the grounds of inadequate signage, but decided not to - how would I have proved it? I shut up and paid up, and since then I've been paranoid while driving.

Then yesterday this letter came in the post, and I have to keep picking it up and looking at it again to convince myself it's real.

London Safety Camera Partnership
Camera Enforcement Section
PO Box 36427
London
EC2M 4WF

26 July, 2005

Dear Mr RANDOM

Ref: Upper Thames Street cameras - withdrawal of alleged offences

I am writing to you as you were one of the drivers whose vehicle has been photographed for an alleged speeding offence by the camera system in the road works along Upper Thames Street.

The London Safety Camera Partnership has been made aware that there is an issue relating to the location of the signs in the 20mph zone.

Consequently, the Partnership has taken the decision to cancel all alleged offences captured since the camera was installed in November 2004. Where applicable the Partnership will return all fines collected and remove all points from driving licences.

Offences are at various stages of being processed and as a matter of urgency the Partnership is investigating the best way forward in which to deal with all cases.

Whilst the Partnership apologises for any inconvenience caused we would like to draw your attention to the achievements of this camera in reducing the number of casualties. In the three year period before the cameras were installed there were 29 crashes involving injury (five of which resulted in death or serious injury). To date, there has been just one slight injury since the installation.

In the meantime, please be assured at whatever stage of the process your alleged offence has reached it will be cancelled forthwith.

A further letter explaining how your case will be handled will be sent to you in due course.

Yours faithfully,

Tom Duckham
Project Manager
London Safety Camera Partnership

Now, knowing that I have a little leeway again isn't going to turn me into a speed freak - I never was one, which is why I resented the points building up my licence. But I'm mighty relieved to know that I'm not one sloppy moment or genuine mistake away from a ban.

And it sure feels good to be proved right!

From Guido (although it's apparently been doing the rounds before he picked it up) comes this notice at Notting Hill Tube station:

Notice to all passengers:
Please do not run on the platforms or concourses. Especially if you are carrying a rucksuck, wearing a big coat, or look a bit foreign. This notice is for your own safety. Thank you.

Yesterday I went into the Co-Op Bank branch at the Angel to pay a cheque in. It's a rather splendid building that once upon a time used to be a Lyons Corner House, the oh-so-English cafes that were the Starbucks of their times, where stiff-upper-lipped characters in 1940s black and white movies meet up in order to act repressed with each other.

It's changed since I was last there several months ago, having been modernised. I remember it as one of those banks where the glass screen protecting the staff hit you in the face the moment you walked in, but now it's airy and spacious, with tasteful wood panelling, plenty of open space, and a small self-serve coffee machine stocked with free Fair Traded drinks.

It also has a round plaque on the far wall, incongruously large and brightly coloured among the soft restful tones of the Co-Op corporate branding, commemorating the building's pop culture claim to fame. In 1935, when Waddingtons had just bought the British Empire and European rights to the new American board game Monopoly, the company decided to replace the rather drab Atlantic City street names with familiar London locations. To that end, the company's managing director Victor Watson took his secretary Marjorie Phillips down to London from their head office in Leeds to carry out some research. As they toured the great metropolis they stopped for lunch in the Angel corner house - and that's why The Angel, Islington, made it onto the Monopoly board. (See Tim Moore's excellent Do Not Pass Go for more on this.)

Sadly, it's not just games manufacturers who travel down from Leeds these days, bombers do too - and the evidence of this was also painfully on display at the Angel Co-Op. A round table in the centre of the branch, more usually used by customers to fill out paying-in slips and other such mundanities of banking life, is currently home to a neat display of sympathy cards. They come from other Co-Op branches, Angel customers, rival banks - anyone who had contact with 20-year-old Shahara Islam, a cashier at the branch who was one of the first victims of the July 7 bombings to be publically named. She was killed by Hasib Mir Hussain, who came down from Leeds with anything but games on his mind and blew up the bus on which she was travelling to work.

I often like to finish these posts with a neat conclusion or a pun that ties all the different strands together, but comments about the randomness of life, fate working through dice rolls, and other such sentiments would be trite and rather pointless here, I can't help thinking. Rather like playing Monopoly on a wet Sunday afternoon, this whole terrorism business is one game that will likely go on forever, fail to produce any winners, and only lead to tears before bedtime.

So far, so good in my return to office-based work. The transport network seemed pretty quiet to me, although the Standard was claiming that was because it was the first day of the school holidays.

Whatever the reason, rail and Tube both seemed to have fewer passengers in general, and in particular fewer older people, middle-aged businessmen in suits or ethnic minority members: I've never seen it so white and so young. But, to coin a cliche, it was definitely business as usual, and the Angel was bustling.

Ah well - off there again in half an hour. Still would prefer to be asleep, you know…

That's £550 with a hotel
I've been visiting the Angel, Islington, for years, but this is the first time I'd wandered into the bit with this impressive interpretation of the area's name.

Free parking
The police presence wasn't huge, but what there was seemed more obvious than usual - bulletproof vests here despite the mundane nature of the call-out.

Grim reminder
It was all pretty normal on the Tube - until you emerged at Angel and were hit with this pointed reminder that all was not well.

Higher, ever higher
The escalator at Angel Tube, from the bottom. Apparently it's no longer the tallest escalator in Europe, but at 60m (197ft) with a vertical rise of 27.5m it's still comfortably top on the Tube network

Not many people
Commentators said Tube traffic was normal for the first day of the school holidays, but to me there seemed fewer people - I'd normally expect to see a larger crowd than this leaving the Waterloo and City Line, even if it was late in rush hour

Have got two days' work in Islington, today and tomorrow, so I'm back on the Tube for the first time since the bombings began. Will be heading into Waterloo, then to Bank via the drain, then up the Northern to Angel. Right now, taking all things into consideration, my greatest fear is the one that I normally have under these circumstances - worry about falling asleep at my desk due to an insomniac night. Not sure whether that makes me naive, stoic, delusional or practical.

It'll be good to get out of the flat and do some office-based work for a change - working from home is all very well, but you do tend to go up the walls after a while. Either that, or become the sort of recluse that shoots the postman.

The dial-up connection dropped on our PC for a few minutes, and in that short space of time we got an incoming call - one of a sort that have been coming in for years now (see here).

Caller: Hello, is that Brent Council?

Me: It's not even slightly Brent Council, it's a private house in the London Borough of Hounslow and you're very lucky to get through because normally we have the internet running on this phone line.

Caller: Oh. Right. Well, what it is is, do you collect rubbish?

Me: No, because this is a private house in the London Borough of Hounslow and you've dialled the wrong number. You've dialled two 8s instead of one.

Caller: (DEFENSIVE) I might have done. I suppose.

Me: Oh, you certainly did - cheerio. (HANGS UP)

The BBC is reporting three Tube stations evacuated after 'incidents' and one bus has also experienced an 'incident', whatever that means.

Edit: Police say they're not treating it as a major incident at the moment, and the Tube hasn't been entirely shut down either. Only one report of an injury, at Warren Street. There actually seems to be a strong element of farce about it - farty little explosions that don't even destroy the rucksacks they came from, an orderly evacuation from one Tube train until just one person was left on it, who then ran like the clappers out of the station pursued by shouts of 'oi, you!'. Too early to be complacent of course, but so far so facile.

Busy night, I suppose. Kingston was a madhouse - the pubs emptying boozed-up lads and short-skirted slappers out onto the street outside the bookshop, while inside gleaming-eyed parents tried to pretend they were only there for their face-painted offsprings' benefit. Endless trollies stacked with the two different versions of the book, the brightly-coloured children's cover and the sombre adult cover. A beaming Borders spokesman braying into a mobile phone about the success of the evening. Small girls in cloaks or Hogwarts uniforms looking tired and - as the night wore on - increasingly fractious. Bookshop staff dressed in wizard costumes that could surely only have been designed by someone who wished them ill. A queue downstairs that snaked away from the tills and then three times around the main body of the store. A queue upstairs that was less frantic, less claustrophobic, and considerably shorter - but far, far slower as there was only one till at the head of it rather than the half a dozen downstairs. And everywhere people clutching green-jacketed books, stopped in their tracks, standing and reading as if hypnotised into doing so.

And since we got home we've read a little, eaten, read a little, stuck photos up on Flickr, read a little - not desperately trying to finish the book in one sitting, but grazing it - taking time to chew it over where last time around we gulped down great chunks of it, until we had each read its 766 pages in a single weekend, but had been left with no clear idea of what we'd just read. Not so this time - we're taking it easy…

There's photos up on Flickr here - I'll add some to this post later, at the moment Flickr's down and I can't.

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.