July 7th – 2 years on

Yesterday was the 2nd anniversary of the July 7th London bombings. For those new to my blog, you probably don’t know that I was on one of the trains that was bombed, thankfully far enough away not to have been injured. I wrote about my original experiences after the day here and my experiences of the first anniversary here.

Last year I was definitely anxious on the anniversary day but I’m happy to say this year was very different. Apart from anything else the anniversary falling on a Saturday meant I wasn’t traveling to work at 8.50 am, and in fact there was no need for me to get a subway all day so I never even went near a train. In fact I was so distracted by other things that I didn’t even remember what day it was until I’d been up for about 4 hours!

I think I’m pretty much as over my experiences now as I will ever be. There’s certainly still some emotional scarring but I’m not sure I’ll ever lose that, and it’s a long way from stopping me doing anything I want to do in my day-to-day life.

Rachel North (another survivor of July 7th and frequent blogger on the subject) has just had a book, Out of the Tunnel, published on her experiences of the bombings and on other incidents in her life that have caused to her to live through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I’m hoping to pick up a copy when I’m back in the UK in a week’s time.

The continuing attempted attacks within the UK are obviously a big worry, partly because there is no apparent way forward beyond just defense. At least when the IRA was bombing the UK there was some kind of hope that a truce could be found, which was indeed what eventually happened. With the terrorism of fanatical religion though there’s no clear road forward that I can see beyond educating our children about tolerance and the benefits of a plural society.

Finishing up, I think it’s good that this July 7th saw the worldwide mega-event of Live Earth. I think what Al Gore and the rest of his organisation are doing to promote the repair of some of the damage we’ve done to our environment is a wonderful thing (and for those that think it’s all a load of baloney please do spend 90 minutes of your life watching An Inconvenient Truth.) Maybe in years to come ‘July 7th’ will become synonymous with a day when humanity started to come together across national and racial divides to actually make the world we live in a better place. If it meant that we forgot about the events of July 7th 2005 I think that would be a sacrifice worth making.