Last Wednesday, a 52-year-old man killed four people and injured about 30 others in a terrorist attack in central London.
Ten days later, London carries on as it always has, a bustling 21st century city that seems to live in a world of quantum mechanics - occupying different states simultaneously, both progressive and traditional, new and old, complex and simple, chaotic and orderly.
Even ten hours after the attack, media reports were coming out of London from incredulous reporters, most of them North American, amazed at how quickly the city had returned to its normal routine and how matter-of-fact city residents were about the whole affair.
And here they thought that "keep calm and carry on" slogan was just some cute tagline to update the stereotype of the British stiff upper lip.
This is a city that lived through nightly aerial bombings by the Germans during 1940 and a nation that stood alone on the Western front against the Nazi juggernaut for nearly two years, made up of citizens convinced the Germans would cross the Channel any day. They were led by Winston Churchill, a prime minister whose speech before the Parliament in London that June ("we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender") remains a high point of both English oratory and defiance.
And so it has continued since, during the bombings by the Irish Republican Army, the riots and the violent protests during the Margaret Thatcher years and through 7/7 - the U.K.'s 9/11, when suicide bombers killed more than 50 people and injured hundreds more in four separate attacks across London on July 7, 2005.
Londoners are experienced at handling random tragedy, both targeted attacks and horrible accidents. They are not blas about these incidents, but they do not panic.
My high school history teacher simply set aside the textbook and talked for two classes about his wartime recollections as a boy growing up in London. He went without some basic necessities that summer of 1940 but love, humour, compassion and generosity were not in short supply.
The feeling was that there were other families in other parts of the city that had it much worse and Hitler didn't have nearly enough bombs to dampen English pride and stubbornness.
I saw this for myself on a much smaller scale four times during the winter of 1990/91, when I lived in London for six months.
The first two were weather related. London was hit with not one but two snowstorms that winter - the first a few weeks before Christmas and the second in early February - that shut the city down. Naturally, the Canadian working in the warehouse at the Heinz factory in northwest London was blamed by his workmates. Perhaps he shouldn't have arrived at work singing Winter Wonderland, a big grin plastered on his face because he felt at home.
Traffic was at a standstill and the Underground was only running underground, meaning in the centre of the city only. People either waited for hours for buses, walked (it took three hours but that's what I did the night of the February storm) or found other lodging. Thousands simply slept in their offices and resumed working the next morning.
Their conduct stands in stark contrast to the outrageous behaviour seen in Vancouver this past winter over slippery streets and the lack of salt. Londoners would have found the residents shouting their rage into TV cameras to be wretchedly uncivilized.
The third incident was the Cannon Street station rail crash on Jan. 8. Two people were killed and hundreds were hurt when the train failed to come to a full and proper stop at the station. On Feb. 18, three weeks before I came home to Canada, a bomb went off in Paddington Station and then another one a few hours later at Victoria Station. Nobody died at Paddington, a station I went through several times a week, but one man died at Victoria and dozens were hurt.
People simply kept moving about their business with minimal fuss. The only anger was directed towards people who either weren't moving or were making a fuss.
"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way," Pink Floyd sing on Time from the classic record Dark Side of the Moon. There is much truth to that famous line, which is both sad and brave.
For Canadians and Prince George residents, far removed and well-insulated from terrorism and other disaster compared to Londoners, we might want to learn from them and emulate their response during times of crisis, big and small, extraordinary and every day.
