I have been thinking.
I think I spent quite a lot of yesterday in 'train crash' mode. Because I live south of the river, and work barely north of the river, the bomb locations are outside of my 'normal' stamping ground. Throughout the day, I received messages from various people who think London, and think me, but I was merely mildly inconvenienced by transport dislocation.
I did not think Security Alert, or get scared. Maybe because I walked past the Eye, past the Houses of Parliament and past Westminster Abbey, 'picture postcard sites'. If they had been cordoned off, or if I had noticed an increased police presence, I would have panicked. At that stage, anyway, I was still accepting the 'power surge' story.
A cursory surf of the internet has shown what I knew would be the case, dozens of security alerts. It beggars belief. I was in two minds whether to trigger one last Saturday. I have stopped a train because of unattended luggage. I have made enquiries on a Piccadilly Line train about a seemingly unattended suitcase - I later discovered that my train had left Liverpool Street five minutes before the station closed for a security alert. I have always been vigilant. What you get in return is sour glares. A friend had a go at someone for abandoning their luggage outside a shop on a station and was called an interfering bitch; the shop manager refused to let the offender into the shop! I recall, in Autumn 2001, a woman playing absolute hell with some American tourists who had abandoned their suitcases on the station concourse when they went into Starbucks. Believe you me, she got a round of applause from a good few people.
I don't want to believe that people can be so stupid, today, to capriciously leave their luggage unsupervised. Or their plastic bags with the remnants of their stinky dead-animal-and-food-poisoning combinations. But it seems that's what's happening.
Oh, yesterday, I did the usual, get a bus on Brixton Hill, the first one that came, because they all go to Brixton. This happened to be a 59.
It took a while to pass from the penultimate bus-stop to the stop outside the Tube, but that is far from remarkable. Sometimes, all it takes is a badly parked car. As we inched our way to the bus stop, we could see that the Tube was closed, and hordes of people poured onto the bus which had been previously less than a quarter full. Again, nothing remarkable. At least a dozen times I have been affected by unexpected closure of Brixton Tube. It's usually a signal failure or a defective train. So I know that if you're on a bus, stay on it, wherever it's going.
I was pondering my alternative. If I had been on a 159, it would have been a cinch - it goes round Parliament Square. I thought, get off at Oval, and get the Northern and District Lines, er, no, I don't work at Victoria or St James's Park. Oh, this bus goes to Waterloo, from where I can get a 507 to work. I noticed that Oval was closed, with a crowd outside. By now, the word was coming through of power failure.
I got to Waterloo and it soon became obvious that I would never get on a 507. It was only a few weeks ago I discovered that TfL insisted that my quickest route from work to the Festival Hall was walk. So I walked.
I was rather relieved that I was not on a 133 which heads out to London Bridge and over into the City. On the other hand, if I had been on a 118 or a 250 which terminates at Brixton I might just have turned round and gone home.
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