RIP 😔😢😢😢🫂 Lest We Forget... 52 Lives Lost For Nothing.
Hundreds of Life-Changing Injuries. Thousands of Lives Affected Forever.
All For Nothing.
PTSD still Real,
even though I was in my own tiny flat.
Unable to DO anything...
But Watching London Burn.
It was 7th July 2005. It should have been the same as any old normal day in Commuter Timed, London.
Four Utter Shitheads from the North decided to make it otherwise. They destroyed thousands more lives than they even killed.
Mine was one of them.
A Life Changed Irrevocably — Because I Was Literally Surrounded By The Chaos, in Mornington Crescent (Russel Square, King's Cross & The Bus at Tavistock Sq within stone's throw distance; Edgware Road so familiar, and not that much further away, either...).
I Was SO Damned Lucky It Was My Day Off Work -- On Whitehall, close by Trafalgar Square. I don't know what I would have done had I been on the way to work when all this happened...
I can still hear the sirens growing steadily more silent on the TV…
Only for them to get louder and louder outside my window
as the ambulances from the scenes flew past towards
the Royal Free Hospital.
The Exploded Back Of The Bus was the Very First Thing I Saw About It, On The News -- and it was literally a short walk down the road from my home.
My sister — working just off Whitehall at Queen Anne's Gate for some Important Place, holding down the fort on the phones there & literally one of the last people to be evacuated out of Central London via Thames Clipper Boats — emailed me, asking if I was OK, and I asked why. Her words in her reply were, “Turn On The News”. I asked for which channel — and my blood chilled when her reply was simply, “All of them”.
My Best Friend & Roommate had barely missed the explosions, having walked out the house only minutes after the Bus exploded; after everything happened, as it transpired.
She was at Euston Station, wondering what the hell was going on, when I saw the back of that damned bus on the BBC News.
I was so damned terrified.
I couldn’t call her. No calls were going through. She was at the station to pick up her parents, who chose that day to visit. I managed to get hold of her eventually, maybe by text messages, I think. I told her to come home, and only then I told her about everything that was happening.
We spent the day staring at a London we didn’t know. A London that we loved, which was torn apart, evacuated & abandoned... Literally EMPTY... Looking like the worst scene from [movie] 28 Days Later.
Seeing everything that happened in the news the next day, after everything had been collated and put together for us all, to let us know as precisely & concisely as they could, really cemented in the Ice-Cold Horror of what truly happened that day.
I made decisions on that day - VERY Bad Ones, as it Very Quickly turned out. Based on what happened, on what I experienced, because of how helpless I felt... Ones that changed EVERYTHING for me... FOREVER.
THE SECOND BIGGEST REGRET OF MY LIFE.
FIND:
Mornington Crescent
(my home then)
King's Cross
Tavistock Square
Russell Square
Edgeware Rd
[Just past Marylebone]
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