Monday, January 29, 2007
Bank, London: Sweet sweet daylight. I'd almost forgotten what it looked like. But there it was, bright and inviting, streaming down into the ticket hall at Bank station. A few final steps through the nearest exit, and escape from the underworld at last, back to normality. Except it wasn't quite normal at all.
This should be one of the busiest road junctions in London. We're right outside the Bank of England, for heaven's sake. There should be buses, taxis, cars, vans and cyclists queued up at the 7-way traffic lights, and pedestrians weaving between. It may be Monday afternoon in the middle of the City of London, but there's nobody here at all. Well, obviously there's 500 of us spilling out of the tube station, but there's nobody else. The streets are somehow completely empty, bar a couple of parked vans and a lot of traffic cones. It's almost like being here on Christmas Day - alone, isolated and forgotten. Whichever direction you look there are just bare roads, and empty pavements, and what looks like blue tape stretched across the street in the far distance. We seem to be in the middle of a human vacuum, an artificial exclusion zone, and it's highly disturbing.
And then there's the sky. Something about the sky is very wrong. There's a swirling fog below the clouds, much lower than normal and much pinker. Or it might be smoke. It's thickest to the west, in the direction of St Paul's Cathedral, but we can't actually see that far to work out what might have happened there. And there's pink in other directions too, and a bit of orange, and some black-specked maroony-red all along the western horizon. And still no people. Where the hell has everybody gone?
Posted at 14:50 from 51°30'49"N 0°5'18"W via my Z470xi mobile
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