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It's been an interesting week. I've spent most of it revamping the departmental intranet site and worrying about where I will work once my attachment in my current department finishes next week. Thankfully it looks lke I finally have a permanent position in the works so on the 18th I'll join a new department as a Designer although my paperwork saying that I'm employed there might take a while to catch up.

The only day this week that I didn't have to do website design was yesterday when I was due in central London for a forum held in the Victoria Plaza. Everyone already knows what happened in London yesterday so I won't reiterate but as someone caught on the (very extreme) edges of what happened it was a weird day. I got on the train at Bristol about 09:00 and was due into Paddington about 10:30. Just before Didcot Parkway the Train Manager gave a message on the tannoy that it looked like Paddinton had been closed and therefore the train may be terminating at Reading (the stop before Paddington). We didn't really know what was going on but people around me with mobiles after a short while started to say there had been explosions in London and that they may have be terrorist acts.

A couple of the train stewards then came through and started to check that the luggage in the holdalls at the ends of the carriage were claimed by people on the train. When one of the bags went unclaimed me and the lady opposite me remarked to each other that 'it was a good way to frighten a carriage full of people'. I wasn't really frightened but I think some of the people in the carriage might have been. The stewards took the unclaimed bag off somewhere outside of the carriage I was in.

The tain eventually got to Didcot Parkway and while some people got off, most carried on in the hopes that Paddington would re-open and we'd get to where we needed to go without being too late.

At reading we were told that the train would terminate as Paddington was still closed so we all got off, waited around on the platform and wondered what to do next. I eventually managed to get in touch with one of the people who I was working for who said that I should just go back to Bristol as London was chaos. No-one I spoke to while we were there deciding what to do really knew what was happening or the extent of the chaos in London.

Eventually I managed to get on a train back to Bristol but the disruption unfortunately was now spreading across the country. We were halted before Swindon as it had been evacuated due to a suspicious package. We finally managed to get clearance to go through and it was very eerie. The whole station was deserted. Ther were no people in the carpark or surrounding areas and a solitary train was left empty by the opposite platform.

Once through Swindon we were again halted as the whole of the Western railways were told to 'stop' until further notice. Eventually were were allowed to proceed and then we were at Bristol Temple Meads. There were a couple of film crews at Temple Meads which was strange, interviewing people getting off my train. I wondered what they would talk about as most of us were people that had never even made it to London in the first place and were probably even less informed about what was going on that the general public.

Given that it had taken so long to get there it was somewhat suprising when I managed to jump directly on a train heading to Bristol Parkway and within about 15 minutes I was getting into my car preparing for the drive home.

I thankfully was no-where near anywhere that suffered bombs or suffering and I give thanks that I never managed to get to Paddington as I would have been well and truly stuck with no-where to go and no-way to get home. I have friends in London but they are all over the other side of the Circle Line which would be a long way to walk.

I have deliberately not talked about the issues around the terrorist acts as my views will have been covered far more articulately by thousands of other people around the world. Surprisingly (I'd not normally peg G.W. as being particularly sharp) I think Bush summed up my feelings excellently when he stated that at the G8 Summit there are people working to eliminate poverty and improve the lives of millions of people around the world while in London an isolated group is working to kill innocent people and what a marked difference there was between the two.