On Sunday, R did his marathon thing, got it out of his system. I stayed home, baked some bread and when he came back, I put his sweaty things in the washing machine and that was that as far as I was concerned. And he expressed similar thoughts, shaking his head, muttering about the loud music echoing from the buildings, the millions of plastic bottles thrown on the streets, the mountains of rubbish collecting around the drains and the mad crowds. Never again, he said. He also said, this is crazy, just think of the crowds and what could happen. Irresponsibly mad.

So there.

And of course this is so shocking, it affects us all so much when the victims look like our brothers and sisters, the streets like our neighbourhoods. I scroll through the papers online, the Irish papers concentrating on how many Irish are affected or nearly missed being affected, the Dutch papers found a Dutch participant to interview and so on.

And I remember the Syrian taxi driver from last January, crying as I innocently asked him about the picture of his family on the dashboard. And the beautiful Iraqi post doc who ran into my arms screaming and shaking one morning after she had just found out that her baby brother had been hit on his way to school. And how clueless I felt with the impact of their grief.

Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!