There but for the grace of (your) god...

Well, it started with the Olympic win, waves of indifference rippled over me when i heard London had won it. The photo of Red Ken looking bemused whilst all around him were a whoopin' & a hollerin' struck me as strangely sinister.

Then, on the train to London this morning. Departed from Peterborough, next stop Stevenage. The phones started ringing & the buzz grew in the carriage. Karen called and warned me that the Underground was closed due to a "power surge". The announcement came on that the Tube was suspended but that Kings Cross was still open. From there it rapidly deteriorated & people started picking up messages from the Web & Blackberries about bombs on buses. This was no ordinary incident.

Today was meant to be the AGM for the CMA. I rang the office, who said they were still hoping it would go ahead. I advised them I had a hunch that this was something big.

The bloke in front of me had been talking to an MP who said there had been six serious incidents, it had all the hallmarks of terrorism. Meanwhile, I worked out how to use WAP on my new mobile and checked out the Blair Broadcorpsing Castration- still towing the party line about power surges. Arriving at Stevenage, the guard advised that the train would be returning north and by now, most of us didn't want to go any further anyway.

The cracks were starting to appar on the WAP news, the story was the same but there were a lot of words in quote marks- the journalists were obviously getting restless.

The lady next to me turned white- she had missed her normal train due to the time on her mobile being wrong & she could have been in the thick of it.

It seems that the Mobile network may have been set to refuse calls for a while- the CMA office were unable to get hold of many people travelling to the meeting for hours and hours. Was this perhaps a concern about dial-up detonation?

Once the train started to move north again, there was a ragged cheer. There had been a definite comrades in adversity experience, although we didn't go quite as far as singing White cliffs of Dover.

I thought I'd better ring Morley FM as they knew I was in London that day. Danny Mylo answered & it went straight over his head. However, they rang me back a couple of hours later and put me live on the air for a report (by the judicious technique of holding the mobile up to the microphone).

The buffet took a hammering, for the return journey it was beer, red bull, coffee and smarties. I wasn't brave enough to risk a beer, the shelf the cans were on had a loose central bracket and had been bouncing up and down violently all the way. I wonder how many Stella Shampoos there had been that day?

Eventually, I arrived back at Wakefield again, exactly five hours after I had departed, 20' further south. (i.e. on Platform 2 instead of platform 1). We can re-use the tickets on another occasion which was very decent of GNER, it wasn't their fault in the slightest.

I had tried to read other sites via WAP but it was like watching paint dry. After a Coffee and a hug from Karen we watrched telly for a while in the Police Authority members' lounge, although the stories were still rather sketchy.

Seeing reports of the carnage tonight made me feel a little sick. I didn't feel personally threatened but I felt sorrow for the thousands touched by today's events far more painfully than myself. I have only one word for the scum that perpetrated this appalling attack.


BASTARDS.