We were in London when the Madrid bombings happened last year.
Every day I took the tube from Turnpike Lane to Kings Cross. Sometimes I would meet S and the girls at the British Museum and we would get on the tube at Russell Square to go home, passing through Kings Cross on the way to Turnpike Lane.
A week or so after Madrid, I wrote this in an email to friends and family:
Madrid definitely feels close, and while airplanes are not going to crash into skyscrapers in Red State Capital City Suburb, bombs are probably going to go off in Tube stations in London. After a few days of headlines about victims and suspects, and then the Spanish election, the newspapers turned to trumpeting the likelihood of an attack in London, which everyone agrees is very high. The day after the bombing there was a noticeable increase in the police presence in the Tube, as well as in the frequency of the PA announcement about not leaving your luggage unattended at King’s Cross. At [work], we observed the three minutes of silence for the victims. When I go down the escalator at King’s Cross, I often think about it, but I have to take the Tube home, so I just stop thinking about it and read about Samuel Pepys instead.
I'm sure nobody was thinking about it on the train between Kings Cross and Russell Square this morning.
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it's very strange to be here in Oxford where daily life is going on absolutely as usual (at least here in our little protected enclave) and know that for some people London life is now irrevocably changed. And yet we still have our dinner plans this evening, the kids are still going out to the park and whining when they have to stay home...and all that.
I think we'll make our way in to London in the next week or so and maybe it will hit us then, but for the moment it still all seems very distant and strange, even here less than two hours away.
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