Late at night, I can hear two things, usually, that remind me where I am, give me a sense of place. If the wind is right, the sound of Big Ben drifts over the West End, and reaches me through my open window. The other, more regular noise, is a soft rumbling, when my ear is pressed to my pillow: the Piccadilly line underneath me, between Kings Cross and Russell Square.

The day before, I’d discovered something about my relationship to London, through a Freudian slip. I was with a client, and I heard cheers from the office next door. “Oh,” I said, “we’ve won the Olympics”. Then, I said, bemused, having heard myself, “Oh. I said ‘we’.” My client smiled, having noticed it too.
This Irishman is a Londoner? Could it be, after years of resistance, in spite of everything, and in particular in spite of myself, just as I’m planning my getaway, that I’ve adopted this city, or allowed it to adopt me?
I was genuinely pleased, though – the London games will be excellent, and I think that Stratford, an area I worked in for three years, and whose people I grew to love, will benefit enormously from the games. I like the multicultural aspect to the bid – for I believe that it’s authentic. London manages its enormous diversity well, probably better than any other city.
I get the papers, which are full of London’s celebrations, and hope for the future in Edinburgh and the G8.
In particular, Messers Geldof and Bono are doing Ireland proud, pricking the world’s conscience, articulating a humane passionate logic that Blair is allowing himself to champion, forcing the most powerful men in the world to engage with it. I switch off the radio news at nine am to do some writing, just as the first bomb goes off.
The helicopters are annoying. But there are often helicopters around town. The sirens on the police cars are unusual though, in such numbers; and the speed with they thunder through our local sidestreets is very unusual.
Then the phone rings, and my friend Ed says “hi” and I say “hello” and I settle down for a chat. He is surprised. “Haven’t you heard?” he says, in that tone of voice. “No, what’s happening now?” I say, and I begin walking and reaching for the TV remote, in that curious automatic way that is familiar since 9/11 – a heart sinking, a preparation to surrender to the monster that is 24-hour disaster TV.
Then I enter a curious half-world, and I don’t think I’ve come out of it yet. My neighbourhood is there on TV, the bombs are exploding around me. I’ve not heard them, which I can’t understand. But on the screen, I’m looking at my local post office, my local tube stations, my local bank and bookshop and coffee shop, and the route I cycle every day.
One of the buses I would take into town has exploded around the corner from my local fish and chip shop, in a street it shouldn’t be in. It’s powerfully disorientating. I hang up on Ed and call home.
My Dad, cheerfully ignorant of the news, answers, so I am relieved that the folks are spared the panic. I try to call my sister but she’s away and the mobile network is down.
All of London is trying to text or call on their mobiles, and the system is dead. The police say: “stay where you are”. That’s the sort of advice I realise I need to hear. OK. I stay where I am. I do not know how long the bombs are going to continue exploding.
No one does. I try to contact a client who I’m supposed to see later but his mobile is down too. I realise I’m in the middle of a triangle of bombs all within a few hundred yards, or that’s what it seems like, for the first few hours.
Later, a more macabre truth becomes clear, that it’s just been two bombs in my area, the bus being five minutes walk from me, and the Piccadilly tube carnage just a few hundred feet away, underneath my feet.
On TV, its location is represented by a little orange explosion symbol, and it covers my street.
My landline rings, repeatedly. My friends ring to check up on me. I am loved. A friend rings from Boston. I called her on 9/11. Is this what marks the 21st century? Is this how it’s going to be, from now on? We call each other at each terrorist outrage, checking that we’re safe? I worry about the lack of a mobile network.
I want to text everyone. I can’t get hold of anyone. It’s not till 5pm that it starts beeping into life, and the texts start coming through the bottleneck, continuing through until midnight.
I go out and wander around, and it’s eerie. Within five minutes, I see three separate cordoned-off areas. People are wandering around in a strange way, you can hear everyone talking because there’s no traffic – and I realise that they have all been decanted from the buses and the mainline and tube trains into an unfamiliar area, and they are not sure where they should go.
Everyone has a mobile in their hand or pressed to their ear, trying to get a signal. There is a massive, authoritative, calm, police presence. The helicopters never cease battering the air above. I choose not to go near the police lines, don’t want to see any horrors, and retreat to the safety of my flat, and plug back in to the media.
I am lucky. Nothing’s happened to me. As the numbers of dead and injured rise by the hour, I realise I’m not really taking it in. I know what a packed deep-level tube is like, stifling hot at rush-hour. It is hell enough, in the summer.
To imagine a bomb in that crowded hot space is just not possible for me. A new feature in the news coverage, however, is the amateur mobile phone video, presaging what I imagine will become a very familiar way of covering disasters in the future on TV.
From now on, nothing will be unrecorded, eye witnesses will have their phones to confirm their stories. Perhaps we will never have to imagine horror again. The 21st century is breathing down my neck.
In the evening, stupefied and claustrophobic, I wander out for a take-away. A full 12 hours after the bombs, an ambulance rushes past, some poor creature having been presumably prised alive from the mangled train beneath.
People are milling around the streets still, nowhere to go, no buses or trains, packing the pubs and restaurants. Queues form in my local late-night shop, snaking outside the door. American tourists are piling into the internet café next door to email home.
A policeman gently escorts a man down the road. “You have no idea what we’ve been through today,” he wails, in a Cavan or Monaghan accent, slightly drunk. “The screams,” he moans.
That’s when my tears well up. I so want a hug. I want to get away from the area. I want to have sex, physical contact.
I get none of those things. There’s nowhere to go. I sleep on silent pillows.
The next morning, I dream that I wake up and see that the door to my bedroom has been bricked up, and I can’t get out. Then I wake up.
There is something grimly predictable about this attack on London. Ever since Blair took Britain into war, these attacks and other attacks like them have been inevitable. Emergency workers, well-rehearsed for disaster, have said they have been “lucky”. The way the city authorities responded to these attacks is something that Londoners are, rightly, very proud of.
Through its popular mayor, Londoners categorically opposed the war, and can be rightly proud of that, too. But the Westminster imperial ruling class decided to follow Bush, unquestioningly, and lied to Londoners, and the rest of the British people, to ensure it happened.
This is the inevitable result.
The causes of terrorism are complex and bitter and are well known to Blair, through his intelligent grasp of Irish politics. But he has chosen to disregard them when it comes to dealing with fundamentalist arabist/Islamic terrorism, choosing to follow instead the US policy of simplistically claiming all that is good to the West, and projecting all that is evil onto the enemy. This is unforgivable.
I hated his choice to go to war, lamenting the wound inflicted on the Arab nation, the insult to the United Nations, the ripping up of the Geneva Convention, the cynicism of Guantanamó, the humiliation of Fallujah, the ushering in of complete, terrifying anarchy, and the countless lives lost.
I hate the wound inflicted on the city of London, now, the deliberate attack on ordinary innocent people, the spreading of fear, and the lives lost. But the bombers are not lunatics, they believe themselves to be soldiers in a war.
As long as the West appears not to care for the lives lost and the blood shed and the daily fear that Iraqis and Palestinians now have to deal with, then, as ye sow, so shall ye reap.
In psychology, boundary violations are the most painful (and often the most unconscious) wounds that we carry. It is when, as children, our emotional and bodily integrity is not respected, when someone more powerful than us interferes and invades us with inappropriate actions or thoughts or feelings, often covering them up with lies or deceptions.
The rage that naturally follows is often impossible to express when we are young, but it’s the jet fuel for violence in adulthood, directed inwards through addictions or suicide, or outwards, compulsively and often criminally, against society, or others weaker than us.
It is exactly the same for weak or undeveloped or divided nations, when impossibly powerful and bullying nations violate their integrity, and behave illegally and – most crucially – dishonourably. (I am not saying Arabs are children here – the argument is about responsible use of power, not psychological maturity. Abu Ghraib, anyone?).
The rage against injustice, against humiliation, against lies, against hypocrisy, against indecency, is what fuels these wounded men to do what they do now. It perpetuates the hatred, widens the split between the West and the Arab world, and this is going to dominate the rest of this century’s politics.
And Blair, of all figures on the world stage at the moment, must bear a large responsibility for it, precisely because he knows better. What Londoners have been through in the past 24 hours is what people have had to live with in Northern Ireland for decades.
But the path to the uneasy (yet increasingly settled) peace there is the same awkward, painful, painstaking, teeth-gritting path that must be taken in bringing peace to the Middle East (and by extension, the rest of the world). The longer it’s avoided, the more people are going to die, the more days we will have like the 7th of July, 2005 in London.