"And then he said..."

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.

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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.

Learn the difference!
Because today's bunch seem to have been the most singularly inept lot of bombers to hit this city since Verloc and Stevie…

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.

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.

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.

Just posted this on the almost-dead Blogosphere News.

London's bloggers have swung into action almost as quickly as the emergency services following six or seven bomb blasts across the capital this morning.

Among those liveblogging the events - often from their work desks in the City, or from home after being turned back on their morning commute - are Robin Grant at perfect.co.uk, Tim Worstall and Nosemonkey.

Among the news organisations to do likewise are the Guardian and the BBC.

A LiveJournal community is coordinating news, rumours and offers of accommodation, as well as offering a forum for people to leave messages for loved ones, here. Thanks to The Very World of White Hart for that one.

There's also a Flickr group for blast photos here.

My view, as a London blogger? Hitler couldn't bomb us into submission, the Irish Republicans couldn't either, and nor will this lot. Let Tony Blair go all Bambi-eyed and quivery and spout a load of moronic platitudes if he wants to - we'll just stick two fingers up at the bombers and carry on with life regardless.

Hopefully without invading anyone.

Edit: three more excellent sources

• Going Underground, the Tube blog
• Londonist
• Anders Jacobsen

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.