Back in the early 90s Canary Wharf security had what they obviously thought was a fool-proof method of terrorist detection. When you pulled up to the checkpoint at the gate they asked you to say something to them. If youse had an Ulster accent, the game would be up.
As complacency reasserted itself, the thin blue line was replaced by a thicker line of West Africans, and the potential for false positives (and outright misses) was inflated.
These measures were made necessary by the foiled IRA plot to blow up the then largely empty Wharf in 1992. On the night that the provisionals came to Docklands V and I were standing beside a Mercury public telephone in Cabot Square making calls to Guatemala using some phonecards I had been given at work.
Suddenly the square filled up with armed men in black balaclavas and kevlar vests and we were duly advised by a bloke in a passing black Landrover to leave the vecinity at once. (No black choppers, but it would have been dangerous with so many tall buildings around!)
Now the interesting thing is that we left the scene some 20 minutes before the terrorists arrived in their big blue van. The next day the official reports stated that the plot had been foiled quite fortuitously when " two men tried to park the van near the office tower, security guards came over to investigate. One of the two men inside the van pulled a gun, and he and his accomplice escaped in a smallervan that was waiting nearby, according to police."
Even more interesting was the fact that the friend we had been calling in Guatemala from the phonebox had a call from Scotland Yard the next day. Impressive you might think - no lead left unfollowed. Yet it might have been more impressive if the spook making the investigative call had been able to speak some Spanish.
(One of the rumours circulating last week was that a pair of suicide bombers had been intercepted and shot dead at Canary Wharf. This now features as a discarded lie. )
The dead of any war get far more column inches than the maimed. As of today the US has lost 1333 men and women to hostile action in the War on Terror. 12,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the insurgency since the invasion, at an average 500 per month, though last month the figure rose to 800, effectively one per hour.
What must the figure be for lives disfigured in any number of ways? We're told that around 700 people were injured in last week's attacks and as yet the limbless and the pyschologically scarred predominantly remain anonymous. V told me yesterday that she thought it would be worse to survive a tube bomb as an amputee than to die in the instant. (It was those reports of lost legs in the Hilton lobby bomb in September '75 that gave me nightmares at the time. Only 2 died, but 63 were hurt.)
Given the choice most of us would choose to fall to bits more slowly, but as a manner of extinction, instant vaporisation combines being one of the best ways of departing this Earth, with being one of the worst ways of losing a loved one.
During the 1975 bombing campaign in London, the IRA cell developed a particularly memorable terror technique which involved throwing explosive devices through the windows of fashionable London Restaurants. (It intrigues me why today's terrorists haven't figured out that they could potentially wreak greater havoc by targeting less 'ordinary' citizens.) I remember that nearly every restaurant I went to with my parents soon featured net curtains. I only got to see these at lunchtimes. When they went out in the evenings without me that winter I used to shake with fear that I wouldn't see them again.
On Tuesday 18th November 1975 some friends of my parents were having dinner at Walton's in Walton Street when an IRA bomb came in through the window and landed under their table killing two of the diners instantly. I recall watching one of the survivors of that meal jogging in a pool in Spain the following summer - her legs were still full of shrapnel.
No doubt some will feel that the events of last week could never have happened if we hadn't signed up for the NeocCon Imperial project, supported Israel, women's rights etc. Yet given the newspaper reports that suicide-backpacker Hasib Hussain was leaving little notes in his fellow students' lunchboxes saying "you'll be next" back in September 2001 at the tender age of 14, this piece of thinking may be wishful.
A peripheral member of my father's family has landed herself a stolid policeman as a husband. A few years ago 'Plod' was asigned to some specialist unit within the Metropolitan Police charged with dealing with (or thinking deeply about) the threat posed to the capital by Islamic extremists. Twice a year at my father's events I would have to endure him sentenciously pronouncing at the table that "it's not a matter of if, but when..." Unfortunately, he now needs to equip himself with a new conversation killer.
Speaking of conversation killers Ted Nelson has an effective one, which he recently delivered with aplomb at a dinner at Frode's:
"Did you know that the only difference bewteen a language and a dialect is that a language has an army?"
