Replies to Wanda - Ealing - Happy Birthday Liz - My Gran

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

I have to leave the house in less then 40 minutes, but am seizing an 
opportunity to beg that SOMEONE save tomorrow's chat transcript while 
I am forced to attend a birthday party.

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., hamster8 at h... wrote:
> Thanks for your concern, Wanda.
> 
> Very usually, however, you just ignore this sort of thing.  It's
> been part of life for so long that it's just not worth bothering 
> about. You just somehow *know* it will never happen to you.  Life 
> goes on ... we get desensitised, and the only times I really stop 
> to think about this sort of thing is when it's really bad, like the 
> Omagh attack a couple of years ago.

Question that I repeat from time to time: How bad does it have to get 
for everyone to crazily celebrate its end like in the first chapter 
of Book 1? How much had it affected them before it ended?

Part of the concern that out of town friends feel whenever they hear 
of a castrophe in a city where their friends live is due to the mind 
viewing distant places as smaller. Reports of earthquakes, wildfires, 
floods, riots in Los Angeles get me urgent phone calls 
from friends in New York, at whom I laugh: "I live in VENICE. On the 
COAST. The earthquake damage was in THE VALLEY. The fires are in 
MOUNTAINS. The floods are up in the hillsides where rich people live. 
The riots were DOWNTOWN. None of it was anywhere near me and I was 
not affected." My NYC friends laughed just the same at me when I 
called them with fear over news reports of a riot in Washington 
Heights ("so, that was down at 170th street, that isn't really 
the Heights at all!") and a downtown subway station that had to be 
evacuated because of being flooded by 'a wall of water' during 
evening rush hour ("It was only a few inches of water on the track, 
no human even got wet, it was just a big inconvenience for commuters, 
but I just went to a coffee house for a few hours until the train 
system was back in order.")

> For the record, I was at a very nice party, with some very nice 
> people, where I had some very nice drinks ... on the other side of 
> town in a place called Wood Green, so wasn't affected in the 
> slightest.

IIRC, Wood Green was amusingly also in the news yesterday, as the 
home of an architecturally significant and well-loved public loo named 
The Turquoise Island.