"And then he said..."

Drink deep, folks

Some of the best of the blogs today:

Make My Vote Count: Being British is Great

We did not panic, we did not crumble. We did not burst into irrational fits of anger and go rushing out looking for a scapegoat, a religious group to lynch or a country to bomb. We decamped to the pubs and took the rest of the day off.

We showed the world how to industrialise, how to play cricket and now we're showing them how to cope in a crisis.

For all of this we should be very, very proud.

Skip's Acorn Treasury: Inspector Fenner

“Will Inspector Fenner please report to the office” they said over the intercom at Euston.

“Oh,” said my flatmate who knows all things. “That's a call sign, you know.”

The sirens went off, and they swept us out of the station.

And then there was a very gentle boom.

The London News Review: A Letter To The Terrorists, From London

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city.

Gia's Blog: Londoners Rule

We are not terrorised.

We are just annoyed.

The Germans tried to terrorise Londoners for 40 nights. Londoners just camped out in the Tube singing songs.

The IRA tried to terrorise the British for decades. The British just used the destruction of buildings as unplanned town planning and revamped their bombed cities.

Now these amateurs think they can scare us by messing up the transport system? Bah. We're just pissed off that we can't meet our friend for coffee in the West End.

Piss off, terrorists. Go pick on someone who gives a shit…. You'll get the reaction you want from Americans. Try them again.*

* not really, obviously

And from the same blog, again:

Gia's Blog: Terror Alert Level: More Beer!

People died today. That's a terrible thing for their families, most certainly. But didn't you kids learn anything last weekend? I mean at least we don't have 50,000 people dying every day here, you know? Jesus, the NHS certainly wouldn't be able to cope with that. And, gosh, I wonder if Iraqis will think what happened in London today is worth even noticing? Get some perspective.

Oh, but Gia, you seem so uncaring, so heartless, people died today blahblahblah…

For a relatively small number of people today was an awful day. I understand that. But every day is the last day of someone's life. Does that mean that the rest of us have to stop living? Of course it doesn't. That is what being a Londoner is all about- just getting on with what you want to do and not letting anyone or anything get in your way.

So, relax, all you non-Brits, let us deal with this. Sit down, have a nice cuppa tea, everything will be fine.

And what about the Olympics, eh? Brilliant. Bloody brilliant.

Bourbon creme?

Pfff: Surviving a Terrorist Attack

The train left the tracks and started to rumble down the tunnel. It was incapable of stopping and just rolled on. A series of explosions followed as if tube electric motor after motor was exploding. Each explosion shook the train in the air and seems to make it land at a lower point.

I fell to the ground like most people, scrunched up in a ball in minimize injury. At this point I wondered if the train would ever stop, I thought “please make it stop”, but it kept going. In the end I just wished that it didn't hit something and crush. It didn't.

Europhobia: London Tube Explosions

Cheers for the messages of support. London's grateful. And we're going to keep our heads. Stiff upper lip and all that - wouldn't do to get all emotional. Hardly British - and if we stop being British about it, the bastards have won. So we'll have a few beers, make as many sick jokes about it in pubs up and down the land as we can, and get on with our lives as normal. Other than causing the grief of too many innocent people, these cunts will have achieved precisely fuck all. We shall not be moved.

Non-trivial solutions: An open letter

To the terrorist cunts who tried to kill me today:

Fuck you. You missed me. Better luck next time.

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Thanks to everyone who's texted to check we're okay - in fact, we haven't left the flat today so we were nowhere near anything that might have been going on in central London earlier.

To be honest, compared with some of the stuff the IRA got up to when I was a kid, this sounds like pretty small beer - no worse, just spread across more locations. But we shall see.

Shame it didn't happen 24 hours earier - then we might not have been stuck with hosting the 2012 Olympics.

Another Lib Dem AGM last night - this time the Brentford and Isleworth branch. They'd tempted Ed Davey MP down from the House of Commons to be the guest speaker. Brave man - he took the train, which to Isleworth is the sort of adventure that often ends in tears. You expect to find Marlon Brando at the end of your journey, muttering “the horror, the horror”. During the 2000 GLA elections we surveyed passengers there on what they thought of the service - one replied saying the station was “like a scene from psycho”.

Ed's a good speaker, and he performed well. The message was “optimism! ambition!”, and he overran the time he'd planned to be with us. This presented a problem as he had to be back at the House for the Iraq debate. We gave him a lift back to Isleworth station - but since the driver never returned, I suspect he may have driven him all the way to Westminster. Hope he made it.

The logic behind Ed's optimism was that, although there have been good periods for the Lib Dems / Liberals in the past, never before have we have had so much credibility as a serious party. And the Iraq debate looks to have been a good example of that. The government tries to side-step the question of whether Parliament should have a say over military action. Backbench Labour MPs rebel. What does the opposition crystallise around? A Lib Dem motion. The Tories - the 'official' opposition - support the government. But someone's got to stand up to Blair and remind him he's democratically accountable.

This last month has been a bit frantic politically, and it will get worse before it gets better, but there has been other stuff going on too. Went out to the allotment both mornings at the weekend, trimming back brambles and a small oak tree that was being choked by them. There were nettles that had literally grown ten feet tall in an attempt to get some leaves into the open air above the bramble thicket. I bought a rather nifty hand saw, with a blade that retracts into its handle and a clip to attach it to your belt. I'm a sucker for belt-mounted gimmicks. I also bought a huge back-support belt - it looked like something a weightlifter would wear but it did the job. I'm still getting twinges of back pain but nothing like what I feared I was in for. Lisa gathered up some windfall apples that had fallen onto our patch from a neighbouring semi-derelict one - me, being Mr Picky, was very dubious about them but ate them last night in pancakes without remembering where they'd come from… and thought them very fine indeed. Much to my surprise, I'm really into this allotment idea. Never would have thought it.

Ugh. Way too early in the day for me. Have to get into work early.

I seemed to spend the weekend driving past firefighters' picket lines and hooting - at least seven times during the weekend as the allotment and the Tube station Lisa travelled from both had fire stations on the route to them. Have to say, I was getting pretty bored with the whole hoot-and-wave business by the end of Sunday.

Oh, and I demonstrated my inner shallowness by buying a PlayStation 2 :o) All I can say is, your chances of winning in Formula One are greatly reduced if you drive a Minardi and try to use a game pad rather than one of those steering wheel things. And in the WWE (WWF in old money) the boss's daughter is suspiciously good at the Royal Rumble…

Well, what do you know? Almost no delay on the train this morning. No seats either, but that's not exactly a surprise. The almost-on-time thing, after yesterday's 50+ minute delays, is a surprise.

A software glitch has stopped me from working, so I've pottered into here for a bit.

I'm going to use the 'current tunes' box for whatever book I'm reading at the moment as I don't bother with music often enough. As soon as I can get my head around style modification here, I'll change the box header to reflect that.

Was reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes this morning. Classic - who needs Bridget Jones? Anita Loos did it better in 1925.