What A Difference A Day Makes, sang Esther Phillips. Well, it made a tragic difference for 52 people, their families and friends and maybe for the rest of us on July 7, 2005.
It made a difference for me. I was going to a meeting at the Holiday Inn, Bloomsbury, to learn about a new budget planning process for the hotel company. I was late so took a cab, not the ill-fated Tube. I’m here, in one piece.
I didn’t really know where the hotel was but I know now very clearly that it is between Russell Square Tube station and Tavistock Square. I learned nothing of budget planning that day but something rather different that I have tried to forget but couldn’t. Until July 7, 2009, when another day made a difference.

On July 7, 2005, with a moment’s notice I – as an exec of the hotel company – was required to help pull together a triage (a word I hadn’t known before but which, essentially to me now, means a place of help in an emergency). Murdering terrorists had bombed the Tube system and a bus. We were required to provide space for the brilliant people from the British School of Medicine (thank goodness, across the street) to set up a kind of field hospital. We were also required to provide sanctuary, sustenance and care for hundreds of shocked, disoriented fellow men and women. Of course, we just did it. Training or human nature? I still don’t know, but we did it. My closest ones knew I would be in London that day and so a secondary priority for me was to let them know I was OK. No phones. Oh well, they would find out later, I thought.

What a difference a day makes. My other day was this week when I was invited to attend the opening of the Memorial to the 7.7 victims. It’s in Hyde Park, significantly, on Lovers Walk. Please visit. It’s a tribute, I think to not only the victims and their families but also to the essential services people and every ordinary person who just pulled together. That includes the (Muslim) corner shop owner who refused to close his shop on police advice because “people will NEED cigarettes today!”

Attending the opening of the memorial were Prince Charles, the PM and Tessa Jowell (who was brilliant in the mopping-up, constructive, after-the-event consultation process). Tessa’s poignant delivery to those there included this  Emily Dickinson quote:

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the
letting go.

London’s Mayors (past and present) were there. The leaders of the other parties and Sir Trevor MacDonald didn’t hold court, they simply chatted. It gave me a sense that we’re all in this together; the world, that is. Shame that the murderers didn’t get that sense of shared humanity. And probably still don’t.

At lunch, I met an Afro-Caribbean woman (it’s OK – when I asked where she was from, I expected to hear ‘Islington’ or wherever but, no, she said “I’m Afro-Caribbean”). She lost her sister in the bombs and simultaneously her grandma, connected to the trauma. We smiled, even laughed and I told her how handsome her new baby son, Cheeda, snuggled into her breast, was. “Yes,” she said. “Life goes on.”