Further to what Sauce has said: A city that has weathered plague and pestilence, The Great Fire, innumerable other fires, regicide, revolt, uprisings, Guy Fawkes and other stormings of Parliament and authority, public executions as public entertainments, torture in the Tower, and the Blitz knows how to take things in its stride. I've been ever so impressed by the phlegmatic tone of the BBC news reports I've heard compared to the slightly hysterical tone of CNN, Fox, etc.
I was thinking the other day of one benefit of the monarchy as I saw a news clip of the Queen's public statement at one of the hospitals. She is a living witness to the Blitz on London during World War II and as such provides a personal testimony of the city's resilience. No short-term democratic leader can provide that.
Good to hear that all are safe. As I'm sure we are discovering, there were people of just about all nations on those trains and the bus. On the front page of my local newspaper today, there are mobile phone images of one of my countrymen as he escaped from the bowels of the Picadilly line at King's Cross and reports of others who survived.
I'm sure there's something here, about the stoicism of the response, that fits in with Tolkien's Sam and Frodo and Aragorn. And by that I don't mean to imply anything about those who planted the bombs.
|