Oh what a day it has been

I’m writing this at the end of one of the longest days [originally supposed to have posted yesterday] in recent British history, when terrorists detonated three bombs on the Underground and one on a double-decker bus. No one is quite certain what the transport situation in the morning will be like; announcements have been made that every effort is being made to bring operations to normal, but no one knows quite what to make of this.
The reason for this, perhaps, is that no one had been quite certain of the situation throughout the day; at least, no one who wasn’t Tony Blair or worked in Whitehall or MI5. When the Underground was shut down, the reason given was that there had been a power surge. I had in fact checked the Transport for London website before I left home because a friend had advised me on my mobile that there were “problems on the tube”; I assumed it was one of the usual “signalling problems” that reguarly causes delays (now that I think about it, I’m not quite sure what that means, either). My morning commute takes me down the Piccadilly Line to Holborn, two stops down from King’s Cross.
I’m certain that the newspapers and magazines will be filled with editorials and analyses comparing and contrasting the incidents of the day with those of 9/11, and Mayor Giuliani has already appeared on British television to give his views on the matter, or to fill dead airtime (to take a certain view). These analyses will no doubt be far more clever or piercing than anything I could write, but here’s an offbeat take on it: London’s transport system is one of the few really impressive things about the city for me; it is impressive the way that the skyscrapers of Manhattan are impressive.
London isn’t compact and well-planned the way that Paris is; its streets don’t snap to a grid the way that they do in New York. Yet every taxi driver, in the days before GPS, knew every single back alley and every obscure hotel or monument tucked away behind, say, Victoria Lane, which might or might not be a wider thoroughfare than Victoria Street, Victoria Crescent, Victoria Mews, Victoria Road, Victoria Square, etc.. London is vast, unruly, and its streets are paved-over cart-tracks from a medieval city. Since taxis are prohibitively expensive and cars becoming even more so, most people rely on either the double-deck buses that lurch their way through the narrow streets, or the underground railway system, the oldest in the world (the first carriages were pulled by horses). As a work of engineering in itself, the tube is inspiring: at Holborn, the Piccadilly Line is 15 storeys below street level. (As a means of daily conveyance, it is one of the least pleasant aspects of living in London; even the buskers are off-key.)
An attack on the tube and the bus system is a shaft to the heart of what makes London pulse; and so even if it isn’t as grandiose a gesture as flying an aircraft through a skyscraper, it was a body blow to the city. The city simply ground to a halt as surely as though someone had switched off the electricity to the mains. There is no doubt that the scale of the attack is diminutive compared to that of 9/11, which is not t disparage the “dreadfulness” (to use the Queen’s term) of it. But where it differed most was in the way it was handled by the authorities and the media.
Throughout the morning, the public had very little idea what was going on, beyond the fact that there had been explosions. After finding the tube closed, I boarded a bus, which was then stopped and everyone told to get off. We were politely informed that there were security problems, and told to “go home, or go to a park; stay away from Central London”. I tried to make my way to Central London, and found myself stopped by a policeman, who was also very polite; I had the feeling that if he had found me in the act of murdering someone, he would have asked me to kindly please stop bludgeoning the poor gentleman in the same good-natured tone.
It was not until afternoon that the first photographs of the blown-up bus were released; it was not till evening that the number of explosions and their exact location were confirmed, and the facts released that the army had been called in to secure Charing Cross Station. The radio had been quite surreal all day: after Tony Blair’s statement, most stations simply went on playing music as though it had been a routine announcement about the economy. Contrast this to the constantly “Breaking News” style of CNN, which breaks news with the same insistence and doggedness of someone with poor digestion breaking wind.
I’m ambivalent about this “stiff upper lip” approach to a national crisis; some might even call it deliberate misinformation; certainly, calling explosions on the tube “power surges” is something other than mere downplaying. But to put the question of the responsibility for public awareness of the national situation aside, I can attest that, very simply, it worked. The majority of Londoners simply stayed at work or stayed at home (as they were consistently told to do), a few even probably did go to the park. And since cable is a luxury in Britain, the world was most likely more alarmed than the people who were in their homes or strolling down Sloane Street for a cup of tea.
Tony Blair said in his public address that he would not allow the terrorists to change the British way of life, which I imagine includes everything from clotted cream pudding to insane banking regulations to foreign policy. Some of these things could stand some change; but America promised itself the same thing but failed. The American way of life has changed; you only have to try checking in for a flight to know that it has. In a few hours, we’ll find out how Britain will respond.