Well gee thanks Jobrown, remind me to kick you when you are down sometime. I'm sitting here at 4am because I can't sleep but hey, as long as you feel smug that's OK. Sheesh, why do air passengers make a fuss when their planes are in a near miss - just being self-indulgent, obviously, in your book.
I'm not usuallly someone to over-dramatise myself - I lived through the IRA bombing campaign in London. Two bombs in particular were very close to me and I never made a big thing of it - had that fatalistic 'what can you do about it' Londoner approach. And of course, I'm not directly involved with this as the families of the victims are. But I couldn't think of a way of wording that in my original post without sounding patronising - was too shocked, maybe.
Has no-one you love ever had a narrow escape? Walked away from a serious car crash with no injuries? (Actually dh did once - crash at speed in the rain in rush hour on the M1 and now I think about it my emotions were pretty heightened then).
I'm not asking for sympathy. And no-one asked you to respond to this thread if you didn't like it. I just needed/wanted to share my sense of shock. In what is, usually, for me, a safe place, full of people I 'know' to some extent.
Dh and I are very, very lucky. What's distressing me are two things.
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Personal - the idea that the bombers were a. on his train and b. in the next carriage. All that high explosive was within feet of him and could have gone off prematurely. Wouldn't that trouble you?
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Impersonal - that the bombers were delayed on dh's train. If they had arrived in London on time the bombs would have gone off 20 minutes earlier. There are hundreds of dead and injured who would have escaped had it gone to plan. And hundreds of people alive who might have been dead. That's a terrible thought.
As I said, this was already uncomfortably close to home, with one of the explosions outside a regular place of work of mine - I had to wait, alongside thousands of other people, to find out if friends and colleagues were OK. People I work with have been on the news, talking about how they tried to help people.
Let's hope if you or your loved ones ever have a very close shave, and you are quite naturally shocked by it, you find a little more understanding than you've shown here tonight/this morning.