Alhamdu lillah, I’m still around. Thanks to all the people who wrote to me and commented here to check whether I was safe after this morning’s bombings in London. I actually had a rather interesting day, and I guess as a blogger I should tell the world what I saw and heard of today’s events.<\/p>\n
I live in New Malden, and my work today was out of an industrial estate in Mitcham, which is a bus and a tram ride away. I had to pick up a Ryder truck from Croydon, drive it to Manston airport, which is right out at the far end of Kent near to the port town of Ramsgate, pick up a truckload of baggage belonging to a party of American tourists who’d taken a charter flight from an undisclosed place in the USA (by the tags on their bags, it seems they came from Nebraska!), and drive it to the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, London.<\/p>\n
I headed out of Croydon and picked up the M25 ring road at junction 6, and stopped off about five miles east at Clacket Lane service station. I used the toilet, bought one bar of chocolate marzipan (their coffee is way too expensive, and I’d already had my fill of coffee at the AMT bar at Wimbledon station), and went back to the truck. This was about 9:25am, and Jon Gaunt’s phone-in show was on. They were talking about some strange occurrences, like bangs on the underground which people thought were caused by light fittings falling onto the tracks in front of trains and that sort of thing. They said the tubes were closed down and there was obviously a lot of disruption.<\/p>\n
When I got to Maidstone around 9:45am, the BBC London station’s signal was fading, so I tuned it to Radio 4. At 10am, it was still “power surges”, and Woman’s Hour and the 10:45 drama (The Reef<\/em> by Edith Wharton) passed off as normal. Then at 11, they put on an extended news bulletin and then said they were suspending normal programmes, and joining the BBC’s rolling news channel, Radio 5 Live. (Interestingly, we were also joined with the BBC Asian Network.)<\/p>\n It was at this point that we got the news that the incidents in London were explosions and that not only tube trains but also a bus had been hit. I told one of the other drivers who said it wasn’t a surprise that London had been bombed – if Paris had got the Olympics, he said, that city would have been hit instead. We were hearing that there were injuries and possible fatalities. At that time, our main concern was how we would get through the chaos the bombings were said to be causing. We had to go from one side to the other. Given that our guests were Americans, I mentioned to the other lads that perhaps the Americans might be told that we’d just had a big terrorist attack, so that they could decide whether they wanted to continue their trip (which I later discovered was by courtesy of the State Farm Insurance Companies Group and was a reward for selling insurance!) or go home.<\/p>\n For a while, it looked that I might be going home, as the luggage did not like it would fill three, let alone four, trucks. In the end, I did get some, so it looked like I was in it for the long haul. I made frantic phonecalls to the boss, to my agency, and my family; my Dad works at Vauxhall, and he told me that the traffic was flowing OK round there. I stopped three times on the way to make calls, and answer one from my Mum. She did not know until I told her that the incidents were terrorism and not accidents. I also called the hotel and asked them about the traffic situation and whether there had been any change of plan. There hadn’t been, and it seemed the traffic was OK, despite Edgware Road (which starts at the far end of Park Lane) having been closed due to the bomb attack at the station. But before every jump-off point on the road to London, there were light-matrix signs saying “Avoid London, Area Closed”. Just before the M25 the signs added “Turn on radio”.<\/p>\n I turned BBC London back on just before I crossed over the M25 at Dartford. They were running a “rolling news” feature, and their normal afternoon presenter (Robert Elms) had been replaced with the evening phone-in team of Eddie Nestor and Kath Melandri. Nestor and Melandri made it perfectly clear that nothing would be announced on their show other than what had happened – there would be no speculation. There was a great emphasis on keeping things calm and so there wasn’t much on who was behind the attacks, because it wasn’t known.<\/p>\n The Ramsgate road is a non-stopping highway all the way from east Kent to the Kidbrooke traffic lights. About a quarter of a mile north of there, if you’re going into London, you turn off the dual carriageway onto the Shooters Hill Road. I carried on across Blackheath, down the hill into Deptford, through New Cross and into Peckham, where I hit the usual slow traffic. I kept wondering when I would meet the inevitable gridlock. On through Camberwell, past the Oval, round the big junction at Vauxhall, up the Vauxhall Bridge Road … I could see heavy traffic everywhere, but the way I was going was mostly blissfully clear.<\/p>\n At Victoria, less than a mile from my destination, I met my first police cordon. Traffic was being diverted back along Wilton Road, parallel to Vauxhall Bridge Road. I asked a policeman how I might get to Park Lane, and he suggested going back to Vauxhall Bridge Road, which of course would lead me straight to the point where I was talking to him! I headed for the Belgrave Road, an old double for the VBR, which also led into a police cordon. I ended up driving round in circles in Pimlico, a part of London I’m not too familiar with. In the end, I found myself on Lupus Street which leads to Grosvenor Road. Grosvenor Road runs along the north side of the Thames, and there is a set of traffic lights at which, if you turn right, you will drive up to Sloane Square and then Knightsbridge. But … you can’t turn right. So I had to drive across the river, down to the roundabout (where the Shell\/Sainsbury’s garage is) and back across the river.<\/p>\n I got to the hotel (after driving round one of London’s maze-like one-way systems) to find the other guys already there, and indeed already off-loaded. In the end, they departed for Mitcham before I could even start off-loading, so when I finally got started, I had to bring the luggage from front of truck to back on my own, while the helpers picked them up at the back, an arrangement which didn’t impress me much. If there was any of this so-called “bulldog spirit” in the air this afternoon, it was not in evidence in Park Lane.<\/p>\n I finally hit the road about 4 (I was so annoyed and tired that I thought it was 5pm, which increased my annoyance of course!) and headed for Chelsea Bridge. They were telling people on the news to go home if they could, without stampeding or everyone flooding out at once. So we got an extended rush hour – perhaps because a lot of delay in getting kids out of school. Chelsea Bridge Road and Queenstown Road were slow. So was Clapham Common South Side, as it always is, due to roadworks just south of the busy junction with the South Circular so they can build a new Tesco. And Tooting was jammed up as it so often is. By this time I was really desperate to get back home, as I hadn’t had much sleep last night.<\/p>\n So far (remember, the morning papers haven’t hit the streets yet), I’ve been impressed with the radio coverage, although I’ve only listened to Radio 4 and London Live. I have to say, I find some of the LBC presenters usually pretty calm and reasonable; Jon Gaunt has used “hand-wringing” as some sort of insult, while I’ve heard one of LBC’s guys say openly that he couldn’t find any easy solution for some issue or other, but Nick Ferrari’s reputation is something else entirely, not that I listen to him. I’m at a loss to what this “bulldog spirit” they were talking about means. A “bulldog” is otherwise known as a bull terrier, a dog bred for fighting which used to be known for mauling infant children and for its appeal to morons and drug dealers; the breed has been strictly controlled since a few nasty incidents in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n