'Preventable'

'It seems to me that one of the things which managed to turn off naturally aggressive and naturally inquisitive Special Branch and security service agents, particularly when they were following Mohammed Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombs, may have been an inability to understand properly the radicalizing effects of Iraq, the resonance that it has created for some extremists in a tiny proportion of our population,' he said. 'My argument is unless you realize that this has happened, you aren't going to get very far in actually dealing with terrorism'

Crispin Black who formerly analyzed intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Staff, Joint Intelligence Committee and Cabinet Office and briefed Downing Street on the terror threat, is calling for a 'ruthlessly forensic examination of what actually happened on 7/7' describing it as a massive failure of intelligence. This was before Christmas.
Source


What can I say? I am so god damn angry, still. I have been angry and despairing for the last 3 days to the point where I cannot concentrate, cannot sleep, want to weep all the time. I am almost unbalanced with it. It is getting harder and harder to carry off work, life, normality. I am dangerously brittle. Outside I look normal and inside I am desperate. I want to scream. I feel like everything I have done, everything I have been since 7th July is a fake. I wasn't 'calm', I was numb. I wasn't 'together', I was manic. I wasn't 'dealing with it' at work, I was acting. Couldn't you see?
I had been in my new job three weeks when the bomb went off. What the bloody hell else was I supposed to do?

I have discovered that most non-injured passengers being treated by the NHS after 7th July took an average of 3 or 4 months off. I took a few days, I was back at work and back on the tube on Tuesday 12th July. I am realising that this was a stupid, stupid mistake and now it is too late. I don't know if people get why I am so angry six months on. After all, it has been months, months, days and nights and months. I should be 'over it'. Shouldn't I?

I looked at where visitors to my diary were coming from. I found many were coming from a place called haddock.org
The link said 'Rachel from north London maybe you should write a blog going on and on about the experience for the next six months or more...' That was all it said. Lots of people visited.

Thank you for the link. Yes, of course it stung. This is a personal 7th July Blog, it is a survivor resource, I have tried to make that clear, and I'm afraid that, yes, this is the only place I have to 'go on' about after 7th July.
You don't have to read it, of course.

But let me explain, because I am stung by the comment, why I spend an hour or so, every few days, writing it.
Every day, I wake up, knowing I have to go to work, I am afraid because I have to get on the tube. I travel, standing in the same place as I was when the bomb went off. (Because I know how to escape from there.)

Look. I don't have a choice in this. If I had been hurt in the Tsunami, I could choose to never take a beach holiday again. September 11th? Avoid the U.S, avoid planes. But I live in London, I work here, I cannot avoid public transport. There isn't any escape from it.

Every time I use the tube, I am so afraid. Not only of what might happen, but of the memories that travel with me on each journey. Dark, screams, smoke, death. I still taste the smoke every morning. I eat mints so I can try and mask it. Though the tube is well-lit, though it is 6 months on and we all wear winter clothes, I can still taste and smell and feel one dark day in midsummer when I press myself against the closing doors of carriage one. It is more real than reality. I arrive at work shaking with nausea. I calm down in the loos, I take Rescue Remedy, I breathe in and out. I tell myself it is no longer real. But my body does not realise that it is a memory. It still reacts as if I am about to die.

I work through the day. I do stuff. Ten hours passes. Then I go home again, on the tube. Same shit. Unless I pay £15 for a taxi. I am taking a lot of taxis these days, because the impact of a tube journey screws up my work concentration for several hours. I can't afford that.

Once a week I get an hour, when I sit in a room and I relive the bomb with a CBT counsellor. I started CBT counselling in December 2005. I have had 4 sessions so far. I waited 5 months for the NHS sessions: they hope I will be able to travel on a tube without fear soon. To get to this point I must re-live the bomb again and again and again until I am desensitised. I don't think it is working: it is getting worse.


Afterwards I am shakey. I cannot speak of what is in my head to my loved ones. Six months on, I do not think they want to hear how every day going to work feels like going into a war. How the fear is still winning. It makes me sick. I am not winning this war.
I come home from work, tired. I write, here. It is my small escape from what is there during the other hours. Writing is half an hour a day but it is the difference between sanity and despair, for me. It is a small space where I connect with what I really think and I say what I cannot share. I talk to strangers. I can breathe.

I am not asking you to read everything or anything I write. I write freely, because what else can I do but write? I don't even want to write about bloody July 7th all the time. But it is what people want to hear about. It is the ghost that haunts everything. It is always with me. It has been six months. It feels as if it has gone on and on and on and on and on.
I would love to switch it off. I am so damn sorry for myself.


You do not have to read these words, this blog. But I am sorry that I have to write it. To those of you who read it, I am thankful and grateful. I don't think I have words enough to say how much it has helped.