Diary – 22 July 2005

During last Thursday’s two-minute silence I was in Knightsbridge, standing on Brompton Road. When it was over, the hundreds of office workers and shoppers who had come out into the bright sunshine broke into spontaneous applause. I found myself enthusiastically joining in, to my own surprise. I am usually rather put off by public displays of emotion, but on this occasion the applause somehow underlined the depth of feeling. It also emphasised that the silence had not just been observed because the government had called for it. I wondered whether the same thing had happened in other parts of the city. Londoners have been criticised both for being too phlegmatic in response to the bombings (foreign commentators have compared our reaction unfavourably with that of the Spanish after the Madrid bombs) and for being too mawkish (‘If we had had a two-minute silence every time a V1 landed 60 years ago we would have lost the war’).