2010.07.07 : 2005.07.07
Today is the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks. As is now customary, here's a brief list of things I did to commemorate it:
- Rode the Underground to work.
- Lifted, and ran through the Royal Parks, in my stylin' commemorative Help For Heroes t-shirt (sleeves, as usual, removed).
- Forgot my damned black arm band (again).
- Cranked out this dispatch.
- Will try to hop a bus, for a couple of blocks, on my way home in an hour.
I happen to be reading Martin Amis' memoir, Experience (which I couldn't pass up for a pound – for a first-edition hardcover – in a local charity shop. It's one of those very cool charity shops where the woman running it not only took my money, but also personally approved my literary taste). Some Amis quotes seem appropriate on the day.
"Suicide-mass murder is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence."
- Martin Amis, The Second Plane
"One can afford to be crude about this. When Islamists crash passenger planes into buildings, or hack off the heads of hostages, they shout 'God is great!' When secularists do that kind of thing, what do they shout?"
- ibid
"It [the world under bin Laden] would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else – a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the sole entertainment is the public execution."
- ibid
"Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black. We can’t tell if it will survive us. But we can be sure that it’s the last thing to go."
- ibid
"This is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us."
- Martin Amis, Experience
And if you haven't seen it, here's the 7/7 Memorial in Hyde Park, which opened a year ago today.
