Update: this piece was featured on the Huffington Post UK, here. The police were on alert. Above hearts-and-minds grins, vigilant eyes followed a disparate procession as it streamed into the community hall on a still, pale evening in May. A week before, almost to the hour, a young soldier’s death had sickened a nation. But he had not bitten the dust of the Helmand desert. Lee Rigby fell on a far more ominous corner of the world, a hard grey London street, mowed down and hacked to death in broad daylight by two men wielding carving knives. Almost as soon as the news had hit, the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘Islamist’…
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Into the vortex: the train to London
You can feel the energy around you change as you approach London. It’s something in the atmosphere; the pressure rises and the speed increases as though you were approaching some great vortex. The view out of the window of the train becomes busier, harder, greyer, denser. The eyes have less space to see out to and more details to focus on. Perhaps it’s just nerves. It’s a journey I’ve taken too many times to count but more often than not there’s some big reason to be going back to the city I lived in for four years, the place where my career began. Usually it’s a bit of work that’s…