The Boiled Egg of Infinity

No matter how hard you think about things, no matter how well you plan, no matter how prepared you think you are and no matter how many pennies you throw down wells, life has a strange way of happening in such a way that occasionally manages to completely blindside you. Sometimes this is a pleasant experience and sometimes not. Sometimes it’s huge and you wonder how you couldn’t possibly have seen it coming in advance. And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s so small that it beggars belief.

I never saw it coming.

The events of last Thursday have been well chronicled and commented upon. It’s now clear that four bombs went off, 49 lives lost (at last count) and some 700 people injured, 300 seriously. And yet, life goes on. Londoners returned to work the next day. Life resumed, because to have it happen any other way would be to lose something fundamental and irreplaceable. It’s not done yet, but the long process of a return to normality has begun in London. For all of us really – though it happened in London, that doesn’t diminish the fact that it happened in the UK, to our countrymen, and it could happen again.

So Friday rolled around, and I went to work. I did my job, I read the news, I sent emails, and I enjoyed the glorious sunshine as I walked back to my car. After work on Fridays I head out to see my family, and I always enjoy catching up with my brothers. They’re a lot younger than me, and so I try to see them as much as I can because at that age they’re changing so much it’s scary. I sat down to a dinner made by my dad (ah, the benefits of a father who enjoys cooking) and that’s when it hit me, hard.

My brother Nathan was sitting at the table, opposite me, looking at a newspaper someone had left lying around. On the cover was a picture of the Tavistock Square bus, top deck completely destroyed and the bottom deck looking as if it’s days of travelling around London were well and truly gone. In the corner was a picture of a man with bad facial injuries. Blood, burns, bandages, the works. And there was Nathan, all of 9 years old, looking at these pictures and obviously trying to work the concept of terrorist attacks into a world better suited to Digimon, Pokemon, bikes and PS2 games.

I don’t mind telling you, it took a LOT of swallowing to get that particular mouthful of food down. As it happened Nathan was pretty calm. He had some questions, and my dad and I answered as honestly as we could. Both of us saw little point to sugarcoating what had happened – Nathan is an intelligent boy, he has access to a television, he can read and to evade an honest answer would just invite a child’s imagination to create some spectre ten times worse. For all that though, that fifteen minutes was what hit me the hardest out of this whole thing. Having to explain that there were security forces now tracking down terrorists – and having to go off on a tangent slightly to explain the whole concept of terrorism – to a curious 9 year old who was trying to work out, in his own small and limited way, how his country – and the wider world – has undergone something horrific.

Never, in a million years, would have seen it coming. Never.

However, as mentioned above, life goes on. Old Tony wants us to move on and not give an inch, and at the risk of sounding jingoistic that’s what he’s gonna get. If anything the events of Thursday have underlined to me the importance of enjoying yourself. How many of those 49 people thought that they would pick up that book another time? See that movie next weekend? Not bother with that extra packet of crisps or that glass of wine? It’s a terrible cliche to say so, but sometimes things happen that lend your usual concerns a bit of much needed perspective.

So business as usual for me and everyone else. I live my geeky life to the full, then write about it here for you to read about. Apologies in advance for the depths of sheer unrestrained nerdiness you’re going to be forced to endure.