As I stepped onto the DLR on Wednesday morning, I realised as a Londoner, its not the Earth and its mighty power that gives us city dwellers fear but those around us.
As the days now turn into weeks from the devestating earthquake in my native New Zealand I have become conscious of the things around me that could enganger me yet again. Its the fact I live on the fourth floor and if there was a fire what would I do. I live next to a canal, if it flooded what provisions would I have and how could I provide for my neighbours in the floors below me. I have experienced an earthquake in London but it felt more like a truck driving past than the quakes I felt in my childhood living in Southland, so this is not something I have ever actively concerned myself with.
But its the population that does provide the biggest risk to our daily lives. Its the man carrying a Fitness First bag on the tube with his bomb, the pack of young Asian boys who linger by my church yard (smoking fresh ganga) who are bound to rob me for my iPod, the woman in her burka driving a Ford Focus (I used to think having no porifirol vision was dangerous till I bought my wide framed glasses - burka v Prada = apples and oranges) about to knock me over, the man in full robes walking the street trying to convert me, the crazed football fan in Fulham about to bottle me, the young blackman in a hoodie that wants my wallet or the young white girl in Burbery branding who just wants to swear at me. The drugged and the drunk, the tired and the wired.
We are the ever present danger that presents every day. One where my bottles of water and tinned food can't sustain me in my hour of need (kept to help my lower floor neighbours in that flood of course).
This sounds incredibly people hating. Its not meant to. On pondering this line of thought though it made me once again realise how citizens of London struggle to relate to physical and natural disasters. The sense of space is not something city folk enjoy so when a State in Australia (noted for being on the otherside of the world - who cares right?!) the size greater than the entire country is devestated in floods or fires this is not something they can measure let alone connect with. Fires in London are pretty isolated to bakeries.
But people are tangible. You can see how they could effect and affect you as we commute together and commune together.
Next time I take the DLR I will smile a little broader at the man with the Fitness First Bag and greet the ganga boys in the church yard and nod at the burberry branded girl or the black man in a hoodie at the local Sainsbury's. After all I may well have passed through a phase of being each of these characters in my time here in London.
Together we can make a difference.
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