Its time to tell

What happened to James and the reason this blog started 18 months since July 7/7 and the bomb blasts that killed 52 people and injured hundreds more and silently injured a lot more.

I'll say it here cos I know this isn't going to be read that often( my blogstats for visitors aren't that great after all) but James had both his legs blown off and his arms below the knees and at the elbow.
He was the man, one of the rescuers describes as trying to get up but not being able to( which I found on the BBC website by accident hidden away in somebody's account though haven't been able to find since) though the official line is that he died instantly. God alone knows what exactly happened. He was in the tube until July 9th in a pool of his festering blood and guts.

He was barely 28. He would have borne no resemblance to the curly headed, freckled young man with a few extra pounds that I knew, as his hair and features would have been burnt off by the force of the explosion.

He was very near to the explosion in fact he would have been standing less than two feet away from Jermaine Lindsay, and he got on at Kings Cross on the first carriage
at the set of double doors that Jermaine had.

Rachel would have been standing less than 12 feet away from him but as she describes on the first post of her blog it was less than standing room only it was, as I describe it often when I travel on the tube, as Sardine time.

A very promising young man, with a Politics degree no less got blown apart and the ripples have only just subsided in my head because I can type this without getting tearful and without getting sad. I have as they say come to terms with it, its taken a lot of time and a lot of medication or maybe its because I have taken a benzodiazepine this afternoon and I can do this and not scream with anger at God or life or fate or destiny and am able to describe James's final moments on the tube that day.

What prompted this post?

Rachel's account of what happened to Danny Biddle, I tripped by it by accident today and thought mmm thats the guy that was on the telly the other day.

I had had no idea what had happened in fact I was rather ignorant but it seems he was in the same position as James though he survived and James did not

Talking about an ex lover in the way that I have only serves his memory. I hope that James is watching and reading from the ether and I hope it is a fitting memorial that I alone of the many people he met can actually crystallise what happened to him and post it up for whomever reads this blog post.

This post is dedicated to the 26 people who lost their lives that July 7th 2005

May our thoughts never forget them.

Henry

I have been politically active today

I have been growing vegetables from seed and transplanted them into pots today

Why is this being politically active you say? 80% of our food is now controlled by the supermarkets and their lorries dependent on computer generated barcode readings at the checkout and the price of diesel to move food from their depots to the stores.


True the vegetables I am growing are much cheaper if grown by the supermarket but the taste of them I can control and I can get them from pot to mouth in ten seconds.

Haplessly though I have sown them very late but it means that the peas and the beans and all the other veg will be in season the moment the temperatures rise and the days grow long again.

There are other things in the news, Diana's ten year death anniversary, the legal challenge of the 7/7 survivors and relatives for a government inquiry into the bombings.

Both today and tomorrow there are funerals for friends' mothers.

Second Anniversary

Today is the second anniversary of James's death.

Before finding out about his death I had thought och the bombs don't affect me, they're something that happened to central London nothing to do with me. How wrong I was.

The rest of 2005 was a journey both to connect with the other people in that tube train that morning one of whom was Rachel and the KCU group that she set up which helped greatly to assauge my feelings of guilt and shock and also to find out the details of his last journey.

Life changing stuff and a realisation that everyone is affected by terrorist bombs as people who knew me from before suddenly realised that even they had a connection to those bombings through me, the ripples do indeed get to the farthest shores.

I am indebted to a certain family liaison officer for helping me to move on in the May of last year such that the first anniversary came and went without me even realising it as I was so busy with work I didnt have time to even think about it much.

It is only now that I feel able to write about it and share it with an unsuspecting world.

Life goes on and with it we remember our memories and take comfort and move on.