Being a bit dwelly

On Saturday, we had friends to visit who live near Glasgow. One of their daughters works part of the weekend at Glasgow airport. Mid-afternoon, the phone rang and it was this daughter, very upset. She was now home, but had been getting lots of text messages from friends asking if she was all right, because – I don’t know how much this has been in the news world-wide – attempted suicide bombers had tried to crash a burning car loaded with explosives and nails into the arrivals lounge at the airport. She had actually walked out of the relevant door on her way home half an hour before the attack.

By a miracle, or possibly by the ineptitude of the would-be bombers, everyone escaped injury apart from one of the terrorists, who had set himself on fire. The car got stuck in the doorway, the men were captured and the only result – and of course, it was no doubt one of the desired results – is major disruption of the airport (and other airports too) and huge inconvenience for many people.

Here in Scotland, up till now, I think most of us have felt reasonably immune from such events. Well, I suppose I can only speak for myself, but though I was of course aware that my complacency wasn’t really well-founded, I did half-believe that terrorists wouldn’t be awfully aware of Scotland. Goodness me, the BBC have only recently noticed that we exist – and even now, we all get told on the radio that it’s exam time (when it’s exam time only in England) or school holiday time (in a few weeks’ time, when English schools are on holiday) or bank holiday time (for purely English bank holidays). Scotland is just a wee bit on the top of England, and most of the time I quite like it this way. Rather like being middle-aged – no one really notices you and so life is peaceful.

That illusion is now gone. Saturday was the first day of the (Scottish) school holidays, so most of people at that airport would be families with children. How impossible to imagine the mind-set of those who would target specifically them. And Glasgow is, I’d think, the most cosmopolitan city in Scotland – still not all that cosmopolitan, but with quite a lot of Asian families, particularly. So it’s not as if the passengers would be wall-to-wall Anglo-Saxon.

It’s absolutely not that I think it’s all right to bomb London, or Baghdad, or anywhere else. But however much you empathise with people in other places, suicide bombers only fifty miles away seem horribly near.

At more or less the time of this incident, my mother was arriving at Edinburgh airport from a brief visit to Cambridge to attend my niece’s graduation. The plane was late, so our son, who was collecting her, spent a lot of time in the arrivals lounge there. Hmm. And if our friends' daughter had been a bit later leaving work...

I once said to Daughter 1, who as a teenager was sometimes a bit mournful, “There’s no use in dwelling on the gloomy side of life.” Well, that’s what I meant to say. What I actually said was, “There’s no point in glooming on the dwelly side of life.” This has become a bit of a mantra in our family. And it’s true. We just have to get on and hope for the best.

So here are some kittens.

My blog has become so much more visited since I started posting kitten pictures, but most people aren’t commenting.

I suppose that once the first person has said, “Ah, nice kittens”, there’s not much more to write. But go on, say it all the same. Come on, all together now: “Ah, nice kittens.”

(Look, there's Mr Life. He's looking a bit grumpy, but he's not really. He's a major kitten fan.)