7/7

[Slim]

It's the 21st anniversary of the London bombings. I think the 20th anniversary passed me by.

I had a dose of flu and was lying in bed all day listening to 5 Live. I'd been living back in the East Midlands for three years by this time.

The news unfolded quite slowly, with people phoning in saying that they'd heard loud bangs along the tube tunnels, and others saying that it had most likely been caused by some sort of power surge. Matthew Bannister was presenting a morning programme and I well remember his unease when someone phoned in saying they'd witnessed the bus explosion. Wasn't until after 11AM that it was generally known that terrorists were responsible. Surreal day. Awful.

On a related note I lived in SE London when the Aldwych bus bomb went off nine years earlier and I heard it from my top floor flat, about 7km away. I'd never heard a bomb before, but it sounded ominous. Put the telly on and invoked Ceefax. Page 101, the news page. The first reports about the bomb appeared about 20 minutes later. A few years later I'd have put News 24 on.

Fortunately the only fatality on that occasion was the terrorist.

[dom]

Wow, that brought back some memories, my dad died 2 days prior to that and my daughter who he never met was just  2 weeks old. I'd forgotten how close those 2 events were to the terrorist attack

I'd left London 3.5 years previously and had often used Aldgate East on my way to work so it really hit home.

21years! Bloody hell! And to think I'd already been a member of t-n-m-s for a couple of years at that point