Twice looks like carelessness. BBC News link.
Update 2:44pm – Robin has ongoing updates running again.
Update 2:54pm – Police say this is “very serious incident”. Armed police seen going into University College Hospital.
Update 3:11pm – BBC News carries a timeline. Tony Blair to give statement.
Update 3:40pm – Four buses stop in Whitehall, and police are clearing the area. Reporters asked to turn off cameras.
Update 3:47pm – The following swiped from perfect.co.uk:
Sky News : BBC report, eyewitness accounts, reporters log : Guardian report, newsblog : Wikinews : Nosemonkey liveblogging

(Looking for 21st July blasts? Click here)

London Underground closed after multiple blasts. More at The Guardian. Reason #567 why I… oh never mind.
Update 10:15am :
Most controversial comment so far: “It’s probably the French.”
Update 11:00am:
Flickr has some pictures coming in, and Google News will keep you updated. Also, The Guardian’s blog is keeping track of the updates.
Update 12:05pm:
Fellow blogger Perfect.co.uk has updates at the ready.
Update 12:12pm:
Jihad group in Europe admits responsibility in 200 word statement on website.
Those wikipedia guys are quick: Wikipedia: 2005 London Underground explosions. Also, Londonist has an eye on events as they happen.
Clique update: Friends will be pleased to know that Mel N, Jac, Elli C, Jon B and David B are all ok. Mel was in Aldgate station an hour before the explosions…
Update 1:18pm – Statement from terrorist group, from Europhobia:

Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of Qaeda’t al-Jihad in Europe

In the name of God the most merciful…

Rejoice the nation of Islam, rejoice nation of Arabs, the time of revenge has come for the crusaders’ Zionist British government.

As retaliation for the massacres which the British commit in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mujahideen have successfully done it this time in London.

And this is Britain now burning from fear and panic from the north to the south, from the east to the west.

We have warned the brutish governments and British nation many times.

And here we are, we have done what we have promised. We have done a military operation after heavy work and planning, which the mujahideen have done, and it has taken a long time to ensure the success of this operation.

And we still warn the government of Denmark and Italy, all the crusader governments, that they will have the same punishment if they do not pull their forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

So beware.

Thursday 7/7/2005
Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of al Qaeda’t al-Jihad in Europe.

Update 5:58pm :
Reader Nadem Khan raises an interesting question – can anyone vouch for the veracity of this article?
Update 6.18pm : Guardian tells readers that “Bloggers react quickly to London blasts.” Damn right…!
Update 7.10pm : The BBC now has a dedicated subsite.

About a year ago, I geeked out on mobile phones and bought an O2 XDAII. It was a thing of beauty – a large touch screen and countless useful features that essentially made it a small computer. “Now I don’t have to spend hours in front of the computer!” I announced to Michelle’s obvious glee. Add to that the fact that a friend’s boyfriend had got me a Friends and Family discount for life, and I was a happy bunny. I remember picking it up in Slough, sitting in a lay-by, firing it up for the first time and phoning Michelle, unable to hide my glee.
Times have moved on, of course. The initial glee has given way to slight inconveniences. For example, when I go out on the town, where should I put it? It fills an entire jeans pocket, and if you accidently drop the thing in a drunken haze it’ll no doubt reward you by springing into a thousand pieces. Add to that the constant crashing (it’s a Microsoft system, you know what they’re like), and the fact that loading applications onto it usually caused something else equally useful to stop working and the joy has faded. So, three months ago, my eyes rested pleasingly on the new Nokia 6680. Techy advances mean that it can do almost everything my XDAII can do, but without looking as though you’ve got a laptop stuck to your ear. My recent trip to a conference in London had only whetted my appetite further – the Nokia representative there had one, and was salivating almost as much as I was.
So, naturally, I phone O2 on the day the phone is launched. “I’m afraid, sir, that the phone has been delayed a week. Phone back next week.” So I did. “I’m afraid, sir, that the phone has been put back another week. Sorry. Try phoning next Monday.” So – again – I did. And I think you may be able to notice a pattern here. In fact, for the next 14 weeks they advised me to phone back the following week, and I had no option. I was aware that there was a huge demand for the phone and if I missed the boat by even a day they would be sold out. Finally, yesterday, £9.52 later – I’ve worked out the exact figure for a nice little complaint letter I’m drawing up – I was allowed to order it.
It’s taken 14 phone calls, around an hour of waiting on hold and countless swear words, but it’s arriving tomorrow. The little bugger better be worth it.

I had a date with London yesterday. It’s a rare week when I visit London anyway, but doubly rare when I visit twice inside 6 days. However, these were visits that would warm the cockles of my bank manager uncontrollably. Ladies and Gentleman, I – as someone who regularly has a loose grasp on my current financial matters – now have the enviable services of a financial advisor. Not just a financial advisor, either – a mortgage advisor, a sharedealing advisor, a loans advisor, a pensions advisor – in fact, everything relating to my financial matters now has the benefit of a host of learned folk eager to please.
Now, just a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have said I needed one. I’m paying off my loans through my salary, paying Gordon Brown through the nose, and things were trotting along. However, an old university friend Paul emailed me a few weeks ago with an offer – go and see his financial advisor, see what you think, and report back. There’s no charge, there’s no compulsion to take them on – in short, there was nothing to lose. So off I trotted, and learned an awful lot of things about my finances. Financial holes have now been plugged, and I’m now actually saving for a pension rather than ploughing it all into loans and pub tills. I’m even thinking of branching out into sharedealing – something I’ve always wanted to do – and I can leave it up to them!
So, who are these people? They’re called Perfect Day, they’re based in Farringdon, London, and they appear to know their onions. If you want more information, email me…

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Great, I’ll put the dinner in.”
Sounding unnervingly like a married couple, I arranged to pop over to Nick’s parents house for a bite to eat, some serious TV watching and a bit of computer troubleshooting – something I seem to do a lot of nowadays. And as I travelled over to Pyrford last night, my mind wandered to the last month’s frenetic events.
Not, of course, that any remaining readers of this blog will know about them. My postings have sunk to an all time low, and the combination of minimal time and a lack of motivation have landed me here – 25 days after my last post.
So, back to the car journey, and mind-wanderings. One of the most adventurous days last month was the trip to Silverstone. Simon B phoned at the ungodly hour of 7.30 (I never even knew he got up that early) to ask if I wanted to go to Silverstone for some corporate hospitality at the Touring Car Championships. And the mode of transport to and from the event? A BMW M3. It was, of course, a formality as questions go and by 8.30am I was taking control of the vehicular beast, charging up the A3, M25 and M40 to Silverstone. It was an awesome car, making me feel completely in control and far superior to anyone else on the road. My experience in it went some way to explaining why BMW drivers drive the way they do. Only some way, mind.
The day at Silverstone was entertaining and, crucially, entirely free. Jensen Button was in the corporate box next to us, his Porsche Carrera outside causing all sorts of sycophantic excitement. There are pictures, which if you’re lucky I may put up before 2012.
Most of the month has been consumed with daily trips to Amersham in Buckinghamshire. Not for pleasure – although it seems a very picturesque place – but for business. I won’t bore you with what my job entails, but suffice to say that the client we were visiting had placed an order with us that was forty times the normal size. So, for me, it was an endless carousel of installing, consulting and 7 days of solid training. I was little more than a wreck by the end of it, although this was mainly due to the travelling – a thirty minute trip on the M25 turned into a 2 hour journey from hell every morning and night.
Michelle has not been without excitement, however. She had all four wisdom teeth out, and my arrival to her hospital bed with flowers and a bunch of unamusing jokes failed to cut the ice as she said there, as white as a sheet and unable to speak. The following week of near silence was unnerving, and it was a relief when I heard the dulcet tones of complaint about the clothes I’d left on the floor again.
Whipsnade Zoo was also graced with a visit a few weeks ago – and gave me a chance to see the elephant Michelle adopted for me at Christmas! For those who don’t know, I love elephants. It’s possibly to do with their large floppy ears or enormous clumpy feet – I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that they don’t grow very fast.
I was expecting my elephant to be an enormous, triumphant beast of a thing, but he was still a mere stripling. I suppose living a long time means that you are smaller for longer – something I’ve never had to experience…
Last Wednesday Michelle, Jac, Debs and I went to see Rob Thomas (ex-Matchbox Twenty) at the Astoria in London. The night was in the clutches of the considerable heatwave and the inside of the venue was akin to standing in a sauna for a couple of hours. The gig was as good as we had hoped – and Glasswerk have a review here.
Michelle and I have also made trips to Paul D’s for a barbeque (and a snoop around his brother’s new house – seven doors down from the doorstep where Jill Dando was shot, I was at pains to point out) and Jac’s new house in Harrow for some technical help and a very spicy Indian. We’ve shopped at Gunwharf Quays, dined at Italian restaurants and ate at a very nice pub for my mum’s birthday. It’s been, frankly, a hell of a month and I’ve rewarded myself with two weeks off. I’m currently lounging around in a dressing gown doing nothing except watching the Lions rugby tour and Wimbledon, which is a rare treat. Michelle is off working in Oxfordshire this week, leaving me to fend for myself. How does the washing machine work? How do I cook anything other than a pizza? I’m not sure I’ll make it through the week…

For the first time in a long while, I kicked back and watched a full programme last night – a programme called “Derren Brown – The Gathering“. The eager amongst you will notice I’ve talked about Derren before – in fact, this well-rounded post talks about a previous, well-publicised Derren show. That post caused all sorts of people to flock to wibbler.com and became the second most popular post on the site. So, why not talk about him again?
Derren, if you don’t know, markets himself as a psychological illusionist, manipulating his subjects to do what he wants. Last night’s audience was chock full of British celebrities, all carted off to the event in blacked-out coaches to hide their destination. A large, dimly-lit stage confronted them on their arrival and for the next one and a half hours Derren performed his psychological tricks. And, as ever, they were impressive. He guessed people’s answers with astonishing regularity, seemed to have memorised the entire London streetmap – even down to the grid reference and page numbers of roads.
Or did he? His mental feats seem so unbelievably impressive that he is always going to draw in the critics. As ever, DigitalSpy has a good discussion going on the pros and cons of the performance, but almost everyone agrees on one thing – whatever the suspicions about his mental trickery, Derren Brown is a damn good entertainer. And that is, after all, how he pays the bills.

There is a little visited place just outside Leeds that goes by the name of Beeston. Sadly, Beeston is not somewhere you’d find on the front of any Leeds Tourist Board leaflet, covered as it is with empty and broken buildings, large concrete slabs of car parks and a remarkably large travellers site. However, there is a shining beacon of light just near the centre – my company’s northern office – and this was the venue for me to give my first solo training course to unsuspecting trainees on the merits of our software system. They were travelling from Ireland and London, eager to listen to my pearls of wisdom. God help them.
I made it up to Leeds in a mere four hours, taking in the sights and sounds of the M1 along the way. It seems that regular drivers on the M1 have developed their own way of coping with the mangled wrecks and twisted metal of more unfortunate drivers as they pass by – and their coping mechanism involves ignoring other drivers for a good part of their journey. Every time I’ve driven up the blessed road, it becomes the survival of the fittest, each twist and turn of the motorway presenting intriguing uses of the brake and accelerator from each driver, all eager to get into first place in an imaginary race. Most cruise on in the outside lane, daring others behind to undertake illegally – a challenge which I take on with enthusiastic aplomb. Many others, when seeing that most are cruising in the outside lane, take the inside, steaming past all the other cars with a big grin on their faces.
I made it in one piece, and that night began to look through the training notes for the two day course. I ought to know a little about what I’m talking about, I thought…
As it turned out, the trainees were very low maintenence. One, an Irish man from Belfast with a barely intelligible accent, knew very little about the system while the other, a large African woman, knew even less. The best possible training situation had presented itself – and I got stuck in, flirting with the woman and cracking jokes with the man, making sure I’d win round the audience even if the content was a little below par.
In the end, I even surprised myself with the knowledge I was able to give, and we all met in the bar that night to celebrate, accompanied by Dean, a colleague who I’d only recently visited Switzerland with. We talked for hours, over beer and over dinner, about seemingly nothing. The Belfast man turned out to be an ex-employee of the Guinness factory and was able to confirm my recent revelation about the hangover-inducing chemicals in English beer. On top of that, he was able to divulge several other drinking facts. For example, Guinness doesn’t contain any iron despite claiming to do so; the best way to drink without hangovers is to have vodka and lemonade; and that one sixth of Ireland are allegic to rice, meaning that they can’t drink Guinness.
Sozzled, I wandered upstars to my room an hour later, and couldn’t tell whether I was so drunk I was hallucinating – or whether I did actually see my old college friend Rob Simpson (under the amusing moniker Rufus Hound) presenting a late night BBC show called Destination Three.
I was unsure I’d manage to fill the second day’s training, but I’d remembered an old trainer’s trick I’d learnt the night before – “if you’re struggling to fill the last day, bore them a little and then tell them all they’re going home at 1.30pm. They’ll be pleased as punch.” Which turned out to be entirely true, and I managed to be 200 miles away, in the loving arms of my sofa and my girlfriend, before sundown.

On Saturday, I went to my second live football match. This, for anyone who knows me, is an astounding revelation and one that should be rightly yelled from the rooftops – or at least here on wibbler.com. However, there has been a piece of news that over the past few days has astounded me so much that instead I’m doing a little story splicing – and show why I think the world and its media are edging toward insanity.
So, the match. I’d never been to a football ground before, mainly because I have always had a passionate dislike of the over-promoted, money-leeching game. However, after four years of a football-loving girlfriend, I felt that it was about time I tried to understand it. Oli, the boyfriend of Michelle’s sister, managed to get us tickets for Queen’s Park Rangers, and off we all trotted up to White City yesterday afternoon to watch them play Nottingham Forest.
White City was the home of the QPR stadium – and my first impressions allowed me to put another area of London on my “Never Willingly Visit” list. The area is named after the neverending Prisoner-Cell-Block-H-style housing estate that stretches for miles. It is also the home of the BBC, and as I emerged from the tube station, as I was approached by a number of leafleters. “Want to protest against the Jerry Springer opera?” they asked. “No”, I muttered, thinking that they must be individual nutcases, intent on being the David to the BBC’s Goliath. I hurried past.
After visiting a local pub, we entered the ground, settling into our seats half an hour before the game began. The match was enjoyable – despite QPR being the wrong side of the 3-0 scoreline – but it is in the crowd’s reaction that my main thrust lies. For throughout the ninety minutes, abuse was hurled at any player who didn’t perform perfectly every time, and further abuse was dealt to those in the crowd who didn’t agree totally with the abusers point of view. Kids the age of 5 and 6 were at the ground, swearing their heads off because they thought it was the thing to do. Players were booed by the opposing supporters for anything they did and any player who dared to venture into a corner was attacked from both sides by the crowd. I can almost understand why footballers are paid so much. At least they can afford counselling.
However, it was an enjoyable day, full of tension, despair, fun with friends and a temperature that successfully kicked off round two of my neverending cold.
While yesterday’s match was in progress, the BBC was being hauled over the public coals for broadcasting an opera based on the Jerry Springer Show. A clever operatic idea, i thought – combine televisual guff with high-minded opera and cross a wide spectrum of viewers. Plus, the schedulers can wallow in being “edgy”. But the media and religious groups have been up in arms about the swearing and blasphemy – and true, there was substantial numbers of both, as I noticed when I watched the thing last night to see what all the fuss was about. It was, in reality, a clever spoof on the whole genre of chat shows, and remarkably funny in some parts. I also watched news coverage of the protests on ITV News just as it was being screened. A female protester was detailing how appalling the opera was, how no one should see it. And then the reporter asked if the protester had already seen it. The protester paused – and then said that she hadn’t. I’ll wager the majority of the protesters hadn’t seen even a second of it.
The media weren’t to be abated though and focused on the swear words, while the religious groups thrust their intimidating vective on the blasphemy. The Sun, of all people, managed to convey their disgust – this from a paper that dismisses the topless Page 3 girls as a “bit of harmless fun“. Which, of course, they are. Protests outside BBC studios ensued, BBC employees addresses and phone numbers were published on websites, causing them to go into hiding (“would these religious fanatics consider that Godly behaviour?” I wondered sarcastically) and the papers were all over the story like a rash.
So, how many swear words are we talking here? The Daily Mail announces, in an increasingly self-righteous tone, that it “has 8000 swear words”. That, firstly, is utter tosh. The number was miraculously reached, says the Mail, by “multiplying the number of profanities by the amount of people singing them”. In reality, and ignoring the fact that there’s a load of backing singers, the Mail on Sunday admits today that the real number is “under 300″.
And that’s considerably fewer than the number I and many seven year old children heard in just one of the football stands yesterday afternoon. And this happens up and down the country, every weekend. Not that I condemn it, of course – all that’s needed is a little perspective from those blinkered protesters.
So, if you want to stop your children swearing, as at least four protesters contended in their interviews yesterday, don’t protest in the freezing cold against a late night, once-shown programme. Just leave your kids at home when you next go to a football match.
UPDATE: Bloggerheads has some comments here, here and here. You go, Tim!

It’s not often I get called by a mystery number. So when I managed to miss calls from a London number this afternoon – 020 7360 1007 – while I was busy teleconferencing at work, it set me thinking. Who could it be? Those Channel 5 interviewers, telling me I’d made the cutting room floor? Boris Johnson, phoning for a quick chat of David Blunkett’s demise? Fond hope, I thought, and tried to call it back. It cut off before ringing. Odd, I thought. 3 further attempts also failed.
So, Google came to my rescue. It seems that the number is used by fraudsters to illicit money out of you, and faking their number so that you can’t call them back. Many others have been caught out, according to this blog. I’m unsure how it spins its money – maybe I’ve been charged for making those unsuccessful callbacks. Maybe if I’d picked up, I’d have been landed an astonishingly heavy phone bill next month. Another dodgy number is the less respectable 0870 011 04 15.
So, how to get rid of the little blighters? Well, the only way I’ve found is to ask dodgy sales callers to stop (they’re legally obliged to do so), and sign up free for the Telephone Preference Service. Or, as one poster said, tell the mystery caller, “Yes, that sounds interesting but first I’d like to talk to you about Jesus.”

The grey office buildings sped by as the train picked up the pace. I was busily reading the newspaper, trying to forget that in an hour I would have a camera shoved in my face and a TV crew hanging on my every word. I had been invited up to London to be filmed for a segment of an End of Year Show for Channel 5 and ITV, a fact which was in turn exciting and nerve-jangling. Boris Johnson had been sacked, I was deemed the foremost expert on him. Very good of them to think so, I said, and after goading from my manager and friends, I accepted their invitation. I donned my best white top, conducted an extra-through shave, and travelled up sharpish.
The graffiti on the line was getting increasingly tiresome, and I was pleased when Waterloo came into view. There was little time to amble, and I raced through the crowds and down the tube escalator, desperately looking for the Northern Line platform.
Within 20 minutes, and an astonishing 30 minutes early, I’d arrived. The venue was a posh hotel near Marble Arch called The Leonard, and I approached the reception desk with a air of superiority. “I’m here to be filmed. Where should I go?”, I asked, and brimmed with pride as I noticed the reverence I was suddenly being shown. I waited in the foyer, nervously drumming my fingers and rehearsing the lines I’d prepared on the journey up. Before long I was summoned to a large suite of rooms, and in the main room stood a large television camera, a large umbrella, a bright light and the producer. Both the producer and the interviewer were friendly to a fault, put me at my ease and told me that they may only use a little bit of my monologue, if any, as I was a late addition. They also were astounded at my height – and this caused considerable problems with the microphone and camera alignment. As they struggled to raise the height of their equipment, I went through the facts I had prepared. And then – AND THEN – the camera started rolling. I forgot everything. I tried reeling off Boris facts, witticisms and anecdotes, extolling the virtues of an all-encompassing Boris-led country, and managed to pull a couple of suitable passages out of the bag. However, everything I’d prepared went straight out the window, to my eternal regret.
After 40 minutes, my first foray into the media was over. I’ve no idea if it was good enough – in fact, even if it was good enough I’ve no notion of whether it’ll be squeezed into the programme. My fifteen minutes of fame may be over before I’ve even noticed…