We are not afraid

Over the last few days I must have started a half dozen blogs about what happened. I thought about some poor soul just sitting on the bus, listening to their headphones, reading their paper or book, just like millions of us on the way to work suddenly having the world erupt around them. I thought about how just a few weeks ago I travelled through several of those stations with my friends from America, laughing and having fun and now they were a cross between a crime scene and a war zone. I thought about the horror of people who are still desperately trying to find out what happened to their loved ones who kissed them goodbye over breakfast and dashed off to work like any other day and now don't even know for sure what happened to them.

I thought about the amazing calm and resilience the ordinary folk of Britain showed in the face of this cowardly and murderous attack. I thought about the generations before us who endured even worse so we could be here today, free. I thought about those generations coming together in vast numbers on Sunday on what was to be a day of national thanksgiving for deliverance in the last world war but had now also become another symbol of British defiance in the face of evil. I thought about the bomb scares right here in Edinburgh and how the simple act of going to work was now also an act of defiance.

I thought about all of that, but the words never seemed quite adequate. I'm not normally stuck for words but sometimes events simply are too large to encompass with vowels and consonants. So I thought instead I'd direct you to this web site instead. Please be patient if it takes a while - the hits have been enormous and they've had to simplify the site to ease the load on the servers.