Allons, enfants de la patrie

Happy Bastille Day. Rather than storming barricades and releasing the unjustly oppressed, I will be spending it writing stuff that I don't really understand about fixed assets. I wish someone would come and rescue me.

In other news: having eaten cake every day for about the last two weeks, and feeling extremely blubbery, I have had one of my flashes of This Must Stop and have eaten frugally (so far). I wonder how one makes these flashes more long-lasting, or, indeed, permanent?

I have so much to say about food, eating, weight and all that that I'm not sure I dare even start. Certainly not with my fixed asset reconstruction calling me. Another time, maybe.

This is to remind me that excess baggage - of all sorts - is another thing that I wanted to ramble about.

The War Against Cake

There's hardly anyone in the office today: there are about 10 people here on a floor designed for 300. You know it's been a bad day when your employer pays for your cake - I've just been down to the teashop and my money was waved away. Now I'm just regretting I didn't get the chocolate buttons too.

How very British. Fighting terrorism by donating cake and Earl Grey.

Scary Day

It was an ordinary day today, at the start. I got up early and went to the gym, noting vaguely on the tube report board that there were delays on the Northern Line. Got to the office just after half-nine, and registered, equally vaguely, that there seemed to be a lot of desks for me to choose from.

Then the questions: "How did you get in? Did you get stuck in the tube?" At this point we all thought it was a power surge still. I work in a building with approximately 3,500 Type A personalities, so we all had news websites open and were refreshing them and shouting newsflashes to each other. The news got steadily worse: several tubes affected, not all on the same line - doesn't sound like a power surge to me. We only really understood when we started to hear about the bus being blown up. I texted my best friend (who was waiting for a bus) to tell her to go home.

Then people started to phone their "loved ones" (vile, vile phrase). And some people found they couldn't get through. Then all the phones in the office stopped working. Then all the mobile networks switched to emergency calls only, or were just so overloaded that you couldn't phone anyone. Then our internet servers went down, and our intranet messaging service stopped, and that makes you realise how completely reliant on technology you have become. And, in my case, that you are sitting on the fifth floor of a bastion of capitalism directly above a mainline railway station. That's when it got really horrible, when you got a sense of just how vulnerable and expendable you are.

Thirty-seven people are confirmed dead as I write this. I (obviously) am not one of them. Nor do I know anyone who has been injured or killed, as far as I know. So I am lucky. But I'm also scared.

BUT - as our email servers started working again, I was bombarded with emails from friends asking me to confirm that I was OK. It was a confirmation to me of the fact that my cybervillage is as real, and as full of lovely people, as my physical life.

So this is a brain dump. I don't know how I feel. Glad that I and my circle are not hurt, desperately sorry for those who are, and totally, totally uncomprehending of anyone who can think that this is ever an appropriate thing to do. And yet... and yet.... in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in all sorts of places that I know nothing of (I spent most of my geography lessons outside the classroom as a punishment for drawing moustaches on the Masai women in our textbook) this sort of thing happens every day. And I can't see how it will ever stop.

This is possibly the most self-obsessed post I have written, since, ooh, the last one. What the hell. It's my blog and I'll wibble if I want to.