flemmings | (no subject)

I learned it from my flist, like many other people, because I look at that before I look at the Globe. Ahh, I thought in early-morning fuzziness, bombs in London. Again. When was it...? 1975, thirty years ago. In London, riding on a bus, passing the usual street scene of cordoned-off area and shattered glass and bobbies. My friend pointed to a couple of quiet men standing about doing nothing. 'Plainclothes police,' she said with certainty, even though she'd left England when she was five. I'm sure she was right. Bombs in London. Really, what were they thinking of? London's had sixty-five years of bombs and isn't likely to be rattled by a few more. As I then discovered,

incandescens' FL was saying much the same thing.

And just a bit amused, in a been-there fashion, about the people worrying over friends who live nowhere near London. When Kobe was flattened my sister called me in Tokyo to see if I was OK. 'But Suze, you *know* Kobe's three *hours* from Tokyo on the *Shinkansen*. Our windows didn't even rattle.' 'Yes I know but.' (She didn't call after the sarin attack in the subway three months later. 'But you're not on the Hibiya line.')

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Pretty much, yes. I was a student in London from 1990-93 (and at Imperial College at that, just down the road from certain embassies). One of my memories of the time was sitting in a tube carriage in the height of summer and melting quietly because we'd all been held up due to a suspect package in the next station. And what did everyone get? Bored.

The eye-opener for me was just how long the bombings went on for. My mind had consigned them to the ancient history of the 70's and early 80's. That they continued through the 90's was a surprise. They didn't get reported in Tokyo's English-language press that much.

It's odd to find how much I am used to the concept. Shocked at the moment, yes, but not that surprised.

Shocked but not that surprised feels about right. We aren't used to Americans being bombed so 9/11 was simply unthinkable. (More for them than for those up here raised on tales of the Blitz. We at least knew it could happen.) We're kind of used to the Spanish being bombed occasionally so the surprise of Madrid to me wasn't the what but the who. This thing feels... 'damn, there they go again. What a pain.'

Yes, I'd say that's pretty much the vibe I was getting at work today.

One of the odder recollections of Paris was sharing the street corners with large men in camo, holding machine guns. They made me feel more nervous than any notion of being bombed, frankly.

When was that? Spain in '81 had an unnerving number of soldiers about with Great Big Guns, for reasons I never quite grasped. Post-Franco nerves, I was told, which seemed just a tad odd when the man had been dead six years.

1982, was it? I've a bad memory for dates, but that sounds right. I was never certain who'd been blowing up whom for what reason, just that it was near the hostel I was sleeping in.

First I heard of the London bombings was my clock-radio, tuned to the local TV station, going off at 6 a.m. "Breaking news--explosions rock London!" There's a town in Ohio called London, and the first thing I thought (having just woke up) was, "Why the hell would anyone want to set off explosions in London, Ohio?" Turns out it was the OTHER London.

Must admit that my brain is still attuned to automatically think IRA when I hear "London" and "bombing" in the same sentence.

And I must concur with mikeneko that being somewhere with guards with machine guns is quite unsettling (especially when they gesture with said machine guns for such trivial things as pointing out your pants are unzipped -- something I imagine my mother will never forget about living in Turkey). Nothing like living in a country under martial law to open your eyes a bit.