Okay, so I promised myself I would stay off the topic of the London bombs in my next update, but - well, I can't. Not really. I have other things I want to talk about, but the London bombs are still preying heavy on my mind, so I guess it's not surprising that I still want to talk about them. Well, I still live here, we're still worried, I'm still sitting at the front of the top deck, so... well, there you have it.

But I want to talk about my fanfic plans as well. To this end I'm doing two updates within a few minutes of one another because it seems kind of crazy to jumble my fic-ranting in with my rather more serious ruminations on terrorism, bombings and the like.

Anyway.

Something I don't get is the fuss that people are making about how long it's taking the police to get a positive ID on the victims, especially in comparison to the way things were with 9/11 and how quickly people could be identified there. I can understand this to an extent - the families want to know what's happened and don't want to be left in suspense - but at the same time it seems silly to even try and compare them. The situations are completely different, both in terms of the location of the explosions and forensically. Trying to compare them just seems crazy to me.

For example: the victims of the September the 11 attacks were people traveling on planes, and those working in the World Trade Center and (presumably) the surrounding buildings. Airplanes have passenger rosters, though. Therefore, if someone's name is down on the roster of a plane which has crashed, it's a fair bet that they died. Offices keep records of their employees. They know who should be at work on a particular day, at a particular time - so do all businesses. It's possible, therefore, to get a good idea about who the missing and the dead are almost immediately the terrorists strike.

Not so with an attack on mass transit. It's a totally different scenario.

There's no roster of who was on a particular tube at a particular time. Booking seats on the London Underground? No. Exactly. Same with the buses. You get on, you travel a few stops, you get off. Someone else gets on. People are coming and going all the time. It's impossible for anyone to be sure who they are, where they're going to, what they're doing there (are they meant to be there? Are they lost? Are they running late?). There's nothing to go on, no neatly-typed list of who should have been there. Apart from the drivers, the people on a London bus or a tube train could be anybody at all.

It's no wonder it's taking a while to make identifications, agonizing though the wait must be. Better that the forensic teams and the police get it right now than that they wrongly identify somebody. God knows what consequences that may have. It's not like it's ever going to be an easy matter to positively identify the victims of a terrorist bombing anyway, appalling though the thought is.

To me, it is appalling. I hate to think what kind of conditions the forensic teams are working under. Hate to imagine what the heat wave is doing. I can't help but remember how claustrophobic the tunnels are in the London Underground, or how tightly the trains seem to fit into them. I don't travel on the tube much at the moment, but if I did, I wonder, would I be more apprehensive about going on them than I was and still am about resuming my acquaintance with the Number 68?

No idea. No idea at all.

Call me morbid, but I've been thinking about myself in terms of a missing poster, about the descriptors that would get applied to me if I had been, presumably, killed. I've thought about this before in relation to other disasters, but nothing's ever come quite this close to me before. It wasn't close, really, but all the same... Someone mentioned identifying people by jewelry (a horrible thought, that one). I wear a silver crucifix round my neck near-constantly, except when the job demands I take it off. It never occurred to me that it was an identifying mark, but it could be. I wear glasses, too. And then there's the things I carry... my humorist parents bought me a personalized Winnie the Pooh key fob. How to explain why I use it?

Under the circumstances, identification isn't easy. Not at all. Better that the authorities take their time and get it right than do a quick, sloppy job. Because yes, I'd want to know, but I'd want to know for sure.