Yet sympathy for New Yorkers was, at least on this side of the pond, shamefully shortlived. "The trouble with Americans," a cabbie informed me, while the dead of 9/11 were still being picked out of the rubble, "is they've got no backbone. They didn't go through the Blitz, you see." Neither, of course, did a considerable majority of the current British population - and it shows. If we were really as phlegmatic as we like to believe, would we revel so conspicuously in our moment of tragedy? While the foreign press has been flattering to the British people, our own press has been positively hagiographic. By attacking us underground, the terrorists hid the worst of their handiwork.
Most of us, thankfully, saw nothing unusual on Thursday except pavements teeming with sombre-looking pedestrians. For most of the day, the television news could offer only grainy CCTV footage of ambulances racing along empty roads - a rather consoling sight, demonstrating how quickly our unruly capital can be brought under control in an emergency. For one thing, it was nothing like as fatal: 2,749 people died when the twin towers collapsed; the death toll in London is expected to reach the eighties. Perhaps equally important, Londoners have not been visually traumatised by this atrocity.
Appalling though the attacks were for anyone caught up in them, they tell us next to nothing about the bravery of the British people Call it 7/7 if you will, but this was not our 9/11. Internet chatrooms were flooded with well-wishers expressing their faith in the British people. "One thing I do know," declared a woman in an online quilting bee: "No matter how heartbreaking this and the days to follow will be, there is literally nothing that can permanently bow London or Londoners." All of which is - literally - too kind. It had to be something that allowed me to write my own timetable. It also had to be something to do with living, feeling, and being part of the countryside.
