London
A Londoner today quotes another:
To quote an old Londoner who lived through the blitz and got caught up in the Canary Wharf explosion: “I’ve been blown up by a better class of bastard than this!”
The cold blooded murder of Londoners is no more horrifying than the murder or New Yorkers or Madrilenos — or Baghdadis. But today’s target still has a special hold over my emotions. If your mother tongue is English, and you loved stories as much as I did as a child, then London is the city of your imagination, of Mary Poppins and David Copperfield, of London-bridge-is-falling-down and the prince and the pauper. And if you’ve been there, and visited the places you dreamed about as a boy, and ridden the tube to Picadilly Circus, and climbed the stairs of the Tower of London, and strolled through Hyde Park in the morning fog, then what happened today hurts more than maybe it should, logically.
We are all New Yorkers, we are all Madrilenos, we are all Baghdadis. But I was a Londoner from the time I learned how to read. I know it shouldn’t make any difference, but it does.
I couldn’t even begin to count how many times I’ve visited London in the imagination — Elizabethan, Victorian, modern, future. From Neverwhere to The Anubis Gates to From Hell to the Sherlock Holmes stories and on and on. I’ve never been on the Tube, but I know the automatic warnings say “Mind the gap.” For me, Billmon nailed it: it shouldn’t make any difference, but it does.
My condolences to the bereaved and the injured.
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