Cool Britannia?

Oh well, it was a matter of time really. That tube system, as wonderful and exciting and intricate and efficient as it is to one who is could be classified as a public transport anorak, it was a sitting duck.

I was in London on Septmeber the 11th, 2001. Unemployed, I had just wandered up the road to buy some tickets from the local movie theatre (Moulin Rouge, actually) when the moby buzzed with instructions to put the telly on. Not telling me why, just put it on. That not being possible I aimlessly wandered the Clapham High Street, and have particular memories of being outside the Sainsbury's when I finally found out what was going on. An aeroplane had flown into the World Trade Center. A second hadn't yet. My informant had the radio on, and was listening, agape, to the unfiltered, uncensored news.

I made my way by tube to Tottenham Court Road, I can't remember why. I had some work to do, to get some work. Everyone was thinking "London is next". Indeed, they did evacuate the city. And there I was, standing in Tottenham Court Road as it started to rain. In the shop-windows in front of me were TVs, hundreds of TVs big n small, flatscreen and bedside, all playing the same scene, of that black woman running away from the site, covered in dust.

Strange how you just randomly bump into people in foreign cuntries. There was Kooky Vegetarian Ange reflected in the same window, peering at the same sights as me. "Haven't seen you for a fair while—still in London I see", "No, not since we randomly bumped into one another in that fish'n'chip shop in Herne Hill last year", "How's things?","Good. Feel like a drink?", "Sure, these are my mates..." and so it goes. Conversation over a handful of pints turned mostly on the "Chickens Coming Home to Roost" theory, the 'with a history of foreign policy like theirs they have to expect some retribution at some stage' theory that a day or two later became something whispered in dark corners between like-minded people.

As did the radio news of the flight being shot down over Pennsylvania (to be replaced with a story about "let's roll" valiance), and of more 'planes coming from North Africa and Korea (WTF?).

But that was it. City workers got half a day off, and everything pretty much stayed the same, Tancredi. There was the hysterical talk of "the Tube, the Tube", but there's always been that.

And so it was. And so it shall be.

And what timing! And, in my opinion, spectacularly low success rate. They did a much better job in Madrid, if it was them. I'd thought, if someone attacked the tube, the deaths would be in the hundreds, if not thousands, and the casualties ten times that. That warren of tunnels underneath the old dart was more resilient than I thought.

Nonetheless, a death is a death is a death.

Don't mention the war, eh Tony?

Anyway, to keep the mood light and airy, have a listen to this little instrumental number, and we can all move off to that happy place where ethnic stereotypes were ripe for plunder, the French are all saucy, the Swedes serious, and there are hilarious misunderstandings that follow the mistaking of the Chinaman for a Japanese!