Sunday July 24, 2005

An all-time favourite joke of mine is:

"In the words of the great Edward Spooner, you are a shining wit."

On an entirely less bitter note, my new house is working out great. All of the people are both interesting and nice and we all seem to be getting on well. You could say that there is a good vibe about the place. Because myself and Allan have both only recently moved in, I think the house might be starting afresh a little. There has been a lot of moving things around, cleaning out cupboards, an attempt at trying to cook for each other, that sort of thing. As a house we seem to do a lot of drinking of tea and talking about things, which I really like. I have a different room now and I adore it. Every morning I wake up and stay in bed for about half an hour soaking up the sunlight. I also hang out in my room a lot in the day, just because it is so nice. I am putting anything cool that comes along my way up on the walls.

Thursday July 07
If you haven't heard the news there have been six bombings in London in connection with the G8 summit. My sister's currently living about an hour out of London. After emailing to make sure she was alright, I asked her what it was like to be in London right now and she wrote back with this:

On London bombings from an individual's point of view.. Taz and Nic complained about how late the trains were this morning and then Grant came into our area about half an hour ago (he's another support guy who sits in a different part of the office) and told us all what's happened and the reaction was just shock. The BBC site is down and I can't seem to ring anyone in Australia. It's scary because it's close and it's scary to have to think about whether I'm going to want to go into London on Saturday as I planned. It's scary to think that it could have been biological weapons and then being outside of London mightn't have meant I was away from it.

Today I'm quite glad that there's noone in particular that I'm worrying about. Some of the guys in the office have family that live or work in London and that split second when they were processing the news and thought about the possible consequences must have been awful.

You know when I first came here it used to unnerve me that there's no bins on the underground (because of trouble with the IRA). In fact it's only in the last few months that they've even started putting bins back on the mainland stations and they're these deliberately clear plastic bags that it'd be hard to hide anything dodgy in. I wonder what will come out of this event and I wonder if it will be something that (like the lack of bins on the underground) will make life in London just that tiny bit worse for everyone who lives there.

The strange thing is that shaken as everyone is, life keeps going on. In fact, right now the fact that London is in turmoil doesn't have a lot of practical effect on our lives here until we all want to get home. When I finish writing this I know I've got to get back to answering support emails about web components and it just seems like a strange and pointless thing to have to do on a day like this when I'm reminded that life is fragile and precious.