And then there was silence........

Well, that was a strange experience.

Hundreds and hundreds of people in a square in the centre of London and, if the grass were even harder, you could have heard a pin drop. It might not have been one of the media-favourite centres (King's Cross, outside St Pancras church, etc), but the workers from around Russell Square streamed into the gardens and observed the two minutes' silence like no other silence I have heard before.

Yes, I'd done 9/11 (as an aside, I am sorry that has bypassed 'the eleventh of September' as the moniker), and the Asian tsunami silences, but this was the first terrorist outrage to hit London since I moved to this fair city and, well, as I said before, it has really started to come home to me.

We were just yards from both Russell Square tube station (don't get me going on the difference between the tube and the underground.....) and the Tavistock Sq/Upper Woburn Pl bus bomb, and yet there was a feeling of complete calm, of resignation in one sense but also a steely determination.

Dammit, for better or for worse, this is what we *do*.

I, for one, will carry on doing it. If I die, it will be me (hopefully), and not the demented suicide bomber, who goes to heaven. I'll take tea (or gin, more likely) with my fellow victims, and look down on the perpetrators in hell for ever.

Crickey, that sounded a bit strong. I promise to give you a cat update again soon.