They found his body. Not the kind of news you want to get first thing in the morning. The text didn’t say anything more.

It’s been two weeks since he disappeared in the mountains. They found his car, but he never made it to the first lodge. I tried to tell myself that he might have changed his plans, maybe he met some beautiful stranger and they both set off on a mysterious adventure. K was always playing the unexpected: he enjoyed that. It was part of his image. But I knew I was fooling myself. His spontaneity was always carefully planned. And this time… the guest house reservations, the phone calls he promised to make. Something bad must have happened.

It’s been almost four years since I last saw him. We had a goodbye dinner in our side of the yard. That last dinner was all wrong: he said all the wrong things, talked about the wrong things. I was too busy saying goodbye to stop him. But his words sunk in, and on each of my visits, when I thought of calling him, something held me back. “He was good for you there and then, when you lived in R street, when you were next door neighbours” said A “why mull over it. Look at it this way: it was good while it lasted.” I knew she was right, I should let it go. Yet something in me now wants to embrace him, one last time.

S thought I was attracted to him. This comment caught me by surprise one evening, as we were coming back from his side of the yard, after tea with ginger wine. But I had to admit that it was an infatuation of some sort. There was something of a cat about him. I remember the day he told me, in an astonished tone, that Louise – a majestic grey kitten, one of the many street cats we were feeding at the back yard– had come back to the yard, and had turned out to be a male. “And a real man she is”.

The yard we have here, in Vine Lodge, reminds me sometimes of that open back yard of R. street, where all the neighbours would chat to each other over their fences. From April to November we would all be hanging out in the back gardens: S and me had a little sofa and table outside and we would have all our meals there; K often joined us. Silently, in the dim light coming through our kitchen window, we would watch the slugs take their slow paths on the stone fence; after long moments K would sigh and say: ‘what fun’.

Now, on a sunny London morning, as I finished my passion fruit tea, I heard myself say it after him, against my will: what fun.

I'm trying to log into a website i used to use, but i've long forgotten the passwords. People didn't use to have so many passwords in the past. You'd have your cash card code, maybe, and that's about it. Now everybody has dozens: email accounts, mobile phone codes, etc etc.
Anyway no worries, because this website prompted me with my reminder question:
Where do you live?
now that's very clever of me, isn't it. to pick the address as a reminder question, when i'm moving house every three months.
I guess i took too seriously my squatters' auto-suggestion. It's a well known syndrom. Squatting is really impossible without the self persuasion: don't worry, you're gonna stay here forever. just get on with your life. Courts, owners, bailiffs... they don't exist. this is your home. It's a fairy tale we tell ourselves every night before we go to bed. Otherwise who could live like this, under the constant threat of eviction.

Well the emergency state is apparently off, because the flight path is back in its place, above our house. The average pause of quiet between airplanes is about 3 seconds. But then you have the police helicopters noise, so it wouldn’t get too boring.

There will come a day when air travel will be banned, or at least made hideously expensive. This form of transport is the most polluting; airplanes are the best construction workers of the global greenhouse, because they release their emissions high up in the sky, where it stays. But governments do their best to encourage air travel: airplanes fuel is not taxed, and new airports are being built all the time.

One website I was looking at yesterday contemplated the schizophrenic behaviour of humans: they ban smoking on flights, yet they allow airplanes to litter the atmosphere with the equivalent of billions of cigarettes. Of course, no chance of anything changing soon: not only the oil companies, the airlines and the aviation industry make a fortune from the crazy increase in flying during the last two decades; global commerce and tourism are totally dependant on flights being so cheap. Just imagine our lives without these three days breaks in Budapest, or imported figs from Turkey. How could we carry on living?

Smell the fumes of Waste Culture, the odours of Fossil-Fuel Age: so heavy and sweet, like a crate of rotting mangos in a London skip. I’m sure even Exxon chiefs know it will not last forever. Change is unthinkable but inevitable. The question is, will it come too late. Come to think of it, Stone Age doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect: they didn’t have mp3 players, but at least they didn’t make the planet uninhabitable.

On the last day of the Mapping Festival, we watched short films at 56a. This familiar space, usually stacked top to bottom with books, zines, fliers and latest cry of punk high-street fashion, was turned into a strange cave or spaceship; the walls were all covered with cardboard. One of the films was Pete’s dreamlike airplane film. The images were grained, rough and dirty, they looked like out of a comics strip, or ancient WWI footage. It showed a light aircraft descending into flames, in slow motion. The image flickered and faltered. This short sequence of crash/descent was showed again and again, to the howling soundtrack of red and black nightmares. It was hypnotic. Pete’s obsessed with airplanes, he always films them.

my way out

i've just realized I can connect to an anonymous wireless network from my desk at the yard. Which means i can get internet at home... which is quite bad news for my research.
Things with the house are not good - the new owners decided they want us out asap, after all, even though it's unlikely that anyone is going to move in soon (the house needs major renovations). We'll tell them we need a few weeks to move out. Probably by end of august we'll be out.
but we're not going to open a new squat. P is going to NZ. J is going home to Sweden then to Columbia. E+G will start renting. S and me are also craving some stability. Seven houses in three years... it's tiring.

It has been remarkably quiet over the last few days. I was surprised to find that I can hear the bells of the Big Ben ringing four times an hour: I’ve heard them before from our house but not very often. Then S said something which explained it: have you noticed there are no airplanes in the sky?

They must have diverted the flight path for commercial flights after Thursday’s bombings, so it wouldn’t go near to central London. In normal times every 7 seconds there’s an airplane passing over our house, on the way to Heathrow. It is a terrible noise, but one that you get used to, and eventually can’t hear anymore, until someone draws your attention, or when it’s missing.

Helicopters still go over the house – probably police ones – but it’s not like this constant grinding ugly noise of big airplanes.

Today at the entrance to my college I saw a notice: Have you seen this man? … missing since Thursday’s bombings.. tattoo on left shoulder…

The desperate tone of the notice sent a shiver down my spine. So far I’ve been quite blasé about the bombings: living through so many of them in Israel made me develop a thick skin. In the mid-1990s, when it was still shocking and new, I used to listen to the news for days. But during the last few years, like many people, I detached myself emotionally, and developed a practical routine. Whenever I’d heard of a bombing, I would try to find out the location, and assess if there’s any chance someone I knew had been hurt. Sometimes I would make some phone calls to make sure everybody’s OK. And then I would move on.

But I’ve never seen notices like this in Jerusalem. Israel is such a small place that always, within hours, all the casualties were identified. Here it was different. London is so huge and anonymous. They haven’t retrieved all the bodies from the tube yet. And there are so many hospitals where somebody may be lying unconscious. I thought of the agony of the family, waiting for days for any bit of information, searching the hospitals again and again, hoping that against all odds... he wasn’t on that tube.

My first thought was what a relief all my friends use bikes, so I shouldn’t worry. But then I realized the bus blew up in Tavistock place – 50 meters from my college, and very close the British Library.

I had narrower escapes in the past. March 1996, the Diziengoff Centre in Tel Aviv, I was supposed to be there exactly when the guy blew himself up on the pedestrian crossing; I changed my mind in the last minute. And November 1998, the Jerusalem market. S and Me heard the blast, we were 500 meters away. But I was never closer than this.

On Friday, when I arrived at King’s Cross from Scotland, the station was packed with reporters from all over the world. Bloomsbury area was still cordoned off by the police, and they even had big scaffoldings blocking the view. I guess the bus is still there at Tavistock, and they don’t want people to photograph it. But why is it still there? In Jerusalem they tow the bus after two hours, clean the place up, collect all the body bits and carry on.

I know it might sound harsh. But it’s important to remember that in Iraq these things happen three times a week and they get a small column in the Guardian. Everybody knew this was going to happen – all the security chiefs have been saying that an attack on London is inevitable. And it could have been much worse. The fact that these were probably not suicide bombers explains the low number of casualties (considering these were 4 attacks). I hope it won’t happen again but to be honest, I would be surprised if it didn’t, because sadly, such bombings seem to be a preferred form of 21^st century political violence.

Two years ago, perturbed by what seemed a reluctance on behalf of the ISM (the international solidarity movement with Palestine) to speak out clearly against suicide bombings, I tried to think why these things are wrong. I tried to distance myself from my own position, as someone whose friends and family are at constant risk of getting hurt in such attacks. I tried to forget for a minute the anxiety I felt so many times when someone next to me on the bus had this big bag and a strange look on his face. I reminded myself that political violence against civilians is not the monopoly of ‘terrorists’, and it is constantly used by states, perhaps in a different way, but to no less devastating effect. I put aside my preference for non-violent struggle. And I reminded myself that I don’t believe this is a fight of good and evil; that I don’t believe all suicide bombers are pathological monsters or fanatical fundamentalists.

So after all this, why do I still think are these attacks so wrong? First, most simply, they are wrong because they target civilians and not governments: the dividing line between states and peoples, soldiers and civilians, is something that should be kept at all costs; Second, they are wrong because they almost always hit the weaker segments of society – people on busses, people in markets, security guards (the shittiest job on earth, getting blown up to save other people, for minimum wage) – the rich and the powerful, who hide in their cars and gated malls, are rarely hurt. Third, they are wrong because they create an atmosphere of fear and panic, in which reason is not listened to; such atmosphere makes it easier for rightwing warmongers to argue that this is a war of us against them, a clash of civilizations, a fight to the end, all that bullshit. Four, they are wrong because they are anonymous spectacles of bloodshed, with no clear agenda that can be of any help to anybody. Old school 20^th century underground political violence ('terror' or 'armed struggle', depends on one’s perspective), e.g. the IRA bombings or the Palestinian attacks in the 1960s, attempted to draw the attention of the media and to put forward specific issues or demands. Whatever one thinks, e.g., of the 1972 attack on the Israeli team to the Olympics, the target was a symbol of the Israeli state, and the hijackers made clear demands and ultimatum (release of prisoners and so on). They were not suicidal. The emphasis of 21^st century terror is not on clear agenda as on carnival of destruction. Their anonymity is what enables Tony Blair to claim today that the attacks were not caused by British involvement in Iraq: “these things could have happened anyway”. It’s hard to prove him wrong because the people behind the attacks are not interested, so it seems, to communicate their motives to the Western public.

What will be the reaction of British public opinion? Probably not a patriotic wave like in the US after 9/11. I simply can’t see the British putting Union Jacks on every house. It’s not their style. And sooner or later questions about the War will be asked. The War was never popular here. So will it go the way it did in Spain? It’s hard to tell yet. At the moment it seems like everybody’s in denial. They even try to avoid the word ‘attack’ or ‘bombings’. They call it "the incidents" or "the events in central london". You can always trust the English to use euphemisms.

The British should pull out from Iraq, regardless of what happened on Thursday. But it will be depressing to think that a few cowardly attacks on innocent people made them do it, while a resolute majority against the war, and a march of one million people (February 2002) could not stop it in the first place. Not the best way to promote confidence in Western democracy, is it?

Sorry I didn’t mean this to be a long political spill.

I will soon write about my experiences in the G8 protest.