Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Bitter ironies
Soundtrack: Channel 7 news
Thursday 7th July. Up again early once more to catch the train up to the Blue Mountains. It’s a two-hour journey that pierces through the north-western suburbs before reaching the mountains, and my goodness, they really are blue. Apparently, the blue comes from a reaction between the sunlight and a vapour given off by the gum trees, which makes me think that it’s something to do with a UV-catalysed reaction, like all that free-radical ozone stuff. I’m sure Stephen or somebody else can enlighten us all. Once I arrived in Katoomba, I hopped on the Explorer bus, which is an old London red bus that’s been shipped over here to ferry tourists around the Blue Mountains. It was the easiest way to get around, but I still did an awful lot of walking, allowing me to see all the wonderful valleys and rock formations that make up the range. It was hard work, but I’m glad that I went, because seeing all the dramatic scenery laid out before me was a special experience.
I came home early to recover before another all-nighter watching the cricket. At 7.30pm, I turned on Channel 7 to watch the live feed from British Sky, and Tony Squires, the Australian presenter, was saying that we’d be kept informed of the explosions in London. It was such a surreal sentence that I didn’t believe it until they cut to the live pictures. It had been nearly two hours since the first explosions, and as I watched, I felt sick and scared. Nobody’s safe now. The irony was that I had spent the day riding around in a red London bus, and now one had been blown up. Staying up all night isn’t easy (I admit that sometimes I black out for passages of play), but that night, even if there hadn’t been cricket, I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of sleeping.
Thursday 7th July. Up again early once more to catch the train up to the Blue Mountains. It’s a two-hour journey that pierces through the north-western suburbs before reaching the mountains, and my goodness, they really are blue. Apparently, the blue comes from a reaction between the sunlight and a vapour given off by the gum trees, which makes me think that it’s something to do with a UV-catalysed reaction, like all that free-radical ozone stuff. I’m sure Stephen or somebody else can enlighten us all. Once I arrived in Katoomba, I hopped on the Explorer bus, which is an old London red bus that’s been shipped over here to ferry tourists around the Blue Mountains. It was the easiest way to get around, but I still did an awful lot of walking, allowing me to see all the wonderful valleys and rock formations that make up the range. It was hard work, but I’m glad that I went, because seeing all the dramatic scenery laid out before me was a special experience.
I came home early to recover before another all-nighter watching the cricket. At 7.30pm, I turned on Channel 7 to watch the live feed from British Sky, and Tony Squires, the Australian presenter, was saying that we’d be kept informed of the explosions in London. It was such a surreal sentence that I didn’t believe it until they cut to the live pictures. It had been nearly two hours since the first explosions, and as I watched, I felt sick and scared. Nobody’s safe now. The irony was that I had spent the day riding around in a red London bus, and now one had been blown up. Staying up all night isn’t easy (I admit that sometimes I black out for passages of play), but that night, even if there hadn’t been cricket, I wouldn’t have had a hope in hell of sleeping.
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In response to paragraph 1: you had far better consult Miranda or someone else who's good at chemistry, than me.
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