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It’s not yet eight and I’m already at work. Dedication? No. Back pain. It slowly came on last night, and woke me at four this morning. There was no chance of getting back to sleep. I hobbled to the bathroom and sat in the hottest bath I could muster in the hope of freeing things up, but after listening to over an hour of the World Service, then Radio 4 waking up, I was still barely able to stand up or bend down.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Radio 4’s 05h30 start-up. Lots of friendly hellos, followed by what they call the Radio 4 UK Theme. It’s a dreadful mash of nationalistic cliched tunes. Rule Britannia, Greensleeves, that stupid pipe thing that sailors dance to. Ugh. All it needed was a tinny drum beat to be truly awful.

I gritted my teeth and made it through the nasty music and the shipping forecast and eventually got up half way through the shipping forecast, got dresses and made my way slowly to work, eventually getting on the 06h13 train when it deigned to turn up - four carriages short - at 06h39.

Delays and missing carriages conspired to fill the train, and I got one of the last two seats, of which I was very grateful.

I could have been in by seven, if things had run to time, but the tubes were delayed by points problems, and were crawling with police - far more than there have been since the first bombs. They did say on Radio 4 that police are bring particularly cautious today. Whether that’s because they know something they’re not telling us, or it’s just that today is a Thursday, and both of the attacks so far have been on Thursdays, I don’t know. It was good to see them around, although I think I’m getting terror fatigue. It was actually quite nice to see different headlines for the last two days, focusing on the shuttle launch rather than the bombings, arrests and mindless police shootings.

Every paper seems to be trying to outdo itself, with the Express so far plumbing the lowest depths. Its headline yesterday morning proclaimed all of the bombers to be asylum seekers, which is just plain wrong: they were British citizens. That’s not far off the Evening Standard printing up its board on Friday proclaiming that the guy killed by police on a tube on Friday was a suicide bomber. They were still all out on the streets on Monday morning, by which point it had been comprehensively proven that he wasn’t. Now it turns out he might not have even jumped over the Underground ticket barrier or been wearing a bulky coat, as the police had claimed.

If we take it at face value, the whole episode was a terrible accident, but the way the police have handled the aftermath has perhaps done them more harm than good. Sir Ian Blair, who heads the Metropolitan Police first told the papers that ’somebody else could be shot but everything is done to make it right,’ (like anything could make that right and then sent the guy who had shot him off on a holiday - with his family - paid for by the police.

Fair enough, give him leave, and certainly give him some counselling, but don’t send him on an all expenses paid holiday when the inquiry is under way and his victim’s parents are still in mourning.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 28th, 2005 at 7:56 am and is filed under Journal, London, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.