There was a bomb alert today, a few buildings up from my office in central London.

The cordon ran from about a foot from the entrance to my office up to the far end of the street, something like ten buildings long. I arrived to find a number of people milling around taking advantage of the drama to catch some extra UV before the rain takes hold again.

To be honest it wasn’t the alert itself that captured my attention. It was the reaction or lack there of. No one bats an eyelid now, we’ve had so many of alerts the typical reaction is oh there’s another one and (if it’s not close enough for us to be evacuated) the obligatory joke about moving down the far end of the office. In the event of an evacuation you’re more likely to hear people whinging about having to leave the office than worry about shrapnel.

And it just struck me that was a kind of cool thing about London. Maybe it’s true of other places as well, I don’t know. I just like the fact that London’s reaction to this kind of thing (terrorist threats) is a one-fingered salute and a return to discussing the football/apprentice/whatever. I like it because it’s so refreshing in an age when we’re told to be afraid of everything from Diet Coke to men with beards – it’s nice to see we still have some backbone.

Now if we could just get the trains to run on time…