you're never gonna keep us down...

Letter to the Terrorists (yesterday, on the London News Review website)

"What the fuck do you think you're doing?

This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

All you've done is end some of our lives, and ruin some more. How is that going to help you? You don't get rewarded for this kind of crap.

And if, as your MO indicates, you're an al-Qaeda group, then you're out of your tiny minds.

Because if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name. But, listen very clearly. We'll deal with that ourselves. We're London, and we've got our own way of doing things, and it doesn't involve tossing bombs around where innocent people are going about their lives.

And that's because we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub.

So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your arseholes, and get the fuck out of our city."

as one london friend said, "brilliantly put - couldn't have said it better myself"

and it's true, london is used to bombs. i remember a bunch of them. i vividly remember the docklands bomb that broke the IRA ceasefire way back when. and the IRA bomb that went off in ealing in the summer of 2001, i heard that from my house. we're used to this shit. so we carry on as normal. as the NY Times called it, london is "oddly stoic" right now.

[my sister told me this morning that the most requested song on radio one was the one that goes "i get knocked down, i get back up again, you're never gonna keep me down" etc. she said it made her a bit tearful. i say - ugh, gross. seriously, british public. that's taking it too far. it's one thing to not let some idiots completely disrupt everything, maintaining that british reserve, but that song, apart from not being very good, is just indulgent. seriously.]

but then you ponder the meaning of the bombs, and come across these comments in another article:

"Why - if the bombs were primarily aimed at disrupting the G8 summit - were they detonated in London, and not Edinburgh? Scotland is where the leaders are. The anti-capitalist demonstrators know this. Are al-Qaeda too lazy to take the train north? Obviously not. These bombs were in London and about London.

One of the biggest reason why many Londoners were against the 2012 Olympics coming to their city is the fear that they will essentially turn London into the world's juiciest ever terror target. And who could argue today that this fear wasn't justifiable?

And this is the twisted genius of the bombings. The psychology is perfect: they let London be chosen to host the games, they let the celebrations begin, then they stamped on the celebrations with their bombs. They've slapped their brand on the whole enterprise. Instead of letting the Olympics be a fun thing, an opportunity for sports, communities and business, a positive thing for London and Britain, they have turned them into a curse.

We can look forward now to the 2012 London Olympics in the sure knowledge that terrorists will do their level best to disrupt them. This is what the July 7 bombings mean: al-Qaeda have started the stopwatch on an east end armageddon."

and that, my friends, is a fucking scary thought.