Had to cut lunch short today due to a bomb scare. Irritating because I had to finish half a glass of wine in half a minute on my way to the door, and one just can't enjoy it that way.
We were ushered away from the scene by Community Support Officers. CSOs aren't liked by the regular police, I believe, but on this occasion I for one was quite glad to see them about.
It is ironic, though, that London is the terrorists' target of choice. These plots come along every few months, usually with London as the presumed target. Michael Moore said of 9/11 that the victims weren't Bush voters - the usual parochial idiocy. But there would be some irony in a terrorist attack in London, if one assumes that terrorism is a mere symptom of anger about the war, since in London the population tends to be more anti-war than virtually anywhere else in Britain.
But stuff happens, doesn't it? I remember reading in Martin Gilbert's historical atlas of the Israeli-Arab conflict that the infant mortality rate in the West Bank was 7% before 1967. By the early '80s it was just over 2%. Martin Gilbert is strongly pro-Israel, but that needn't necessarily mean he's lying... Of course some of those kids whose lived probably grew up to be suicide bombers. Just another sick joke we played on ourselves.