Before everyone runs around proclaiming that the world’s going to end, that we really have to have ID cards now, and abolish the civil liberties built up over centuries, can I just step back and point out the actual scale of yesterday’s London bombings?

The death toll is going to end up in the region of 50 – about the size of your medium-sized rail crash, with perhaps three or four times that many people suffering long-term serious injuries, physical or mental. Now that’s horrible for them and their families, but it is about the equivalent of one week’s death toll on the roads.

Then there is the disruption in central London – “chaos on the streets” as the media proclaims. Well actually, the problems were in the same order of magnitude as is achieved quite regularly by a good semi-tropical storm, working in cahoots with the inadequate Victorian drains.

Perhaps we should look at this from the other end of the telescope, and realize that despite the endless scare stores about “dirty” bombs, chemical weapons, even nuclear bombs, this was all al-Qa’ida could achieve.

There will be endless post mortems, and indeed there are good questions to ask. I’ll admit the advantage of hindsight, but wasn’t London, on the day of the G8 summit, when Bin Laden’s enemies were making at least a reasonable stab at portraying themselves as environmentally aware humanitarians, in a notably similar position to the Spanish just before their election?

Bin Laden, or at least those working on his model, have patterns that can, and should be checked and predicted, yet we’re told London was on the lowest level of alert for years.

Accounts have it that 1,500 Met police are being rushed home from Gleneagles. Shouldn’t they have been here in the first place, rather than tearing around Scottish fields trying to stop men in clown suits and women in tie-dye getting within shouting distance of George Bush?

I cycled to work this afternoon at three, six hours after the bombings. (It had been my day off, as it was on 9/11 – perhaps they should institute extra security according to my rota).

The streets of central London were filled with a tide of people, yet oddly quietly. Few were talking, and even those on mobile phones were moderating the volume. These commuters turned pedestrians – pudgy men sweating in once-ironed shirts, suit jackets slung over their arms, and women in heels trailing disconsolate, unhopeful arms at the odd passing cab – had decided like some giant organism that they now owned the streets, and were taking no notice of traffic lights, road rules or anything else, presenting a new cycling hazard.

But there was little need to worry about traffic. The authorities had blocked huge areas around the affected Tube stations; there were no effective routes through the city, and hence no vehicles.

Police and the new fast-multiplying breed of “community support officers” were much in evidence, but were doing only the traditional job of the London bobbie, providing directions to the lost, not, this time, tourists, but workers suddenly discovering the ribbon of land between work and home that they usually burrow beneath.

Pubs were full of those who’d decided the drink their way through the duration, but a continual stream of the hopeful or the clueless was pouring into Fenchurch Street station, which must have been about to burst its worn seams. They were hoping for a train, some time; who knew when they’d get one.

On Cheapside many of the shops were shut. “Security reasons” said a handwritten sign on the door of an expensive cosmetics boutique. Starbucks too was dark and empty, without explanation.

But the banks were open, as was Boots, and shoppers were about their ordinary business. It was as if this ancient market; which has seen in its time Norman, Viking, French and Dutch raiders, had shrugged and said: “This too will pass.”

Near Tower Hill, the lights were still shining from St Olave’s church hall – an undistinguished lump of 1950s brick that replaced ancient stone knocked down by the Luftwaffe. A banner was strung from its windows: “Antique Fair today”. It had customers.

Most, though, had adopted the classic shoulder-set of a refugee, trudging slowly but steadily on; their routes were radial – fanning out from the scene of the disaster.

Outside the central ring of the city, the traffic was also disaster movie-style – mostly stationary and intermittantly panicky, the road hog monsters of the rich suddenly at a disadvantage.

They were passed by a man wheeling a bicycle, his daughter of seven perched uncomfortably but excitably on the seat, her feet on the crossbar. Her long blonde hair was tied back in a bright ribbon.

A woman with a central European accent, riding a surely borrowed bike that was far too big for her, asked anxiously: “Which way to Stratford? I don’t know where I am.” I set her on the simplest route I could map.

Well it is still early days, but monitoring the coverage it seems that there were three bombs on the Tube and one on a bus, which may have been a suicide bombing. The death toll is likely to be at least in the scores, the count of serious injuries similar. The general mood is slight shock, covered by a gritty determination to get on with whatever needs to be done.

Damn: I’d fled Sydney to escape, but now they’re following me.

I was going to try not to be curmudgeonly – and I’m talking about the Olympic Games if you’re that proverbial blog reader who’s just returned from Mars – but then I learnt that the softball and baseball, and 18,000 spectators, will be plonked into the gorgeous, peaceful Regent’s Park, which I count as my backyard. So I decided to let the curmudgeon out.

Since a large part of the British public already seem to think that sport (watching it on the television, not playing it, that is) is the most important thing in the world, it is hard to see how this is going to improve the nation.

This article has some fascinating figures on how fundamentalism is heading in the direction of destroying America’s technological advantage. (Although I don’t agree with its conclusion on Turkey’s membership of the EU, which sneaks into the end as though it is the writer’s pet subject.) It would be interesting to look at the parallels between America and 15th-century China, which likewise turned its back on innovation and the outside world.

* A 2.3m-year-old “factory” (via Mirabilis).

As the date for humans in America is put back significantly, to about 40,000 years, you have to think just how smart our ancestors were. The current date for the emergence on anatomically modern humans emerging is about 100,000 years ago in Africa, and if you look at some of the suggested but still controversial dates, they colonised the planet in an astonishingly short period of time. We think we live in a world of massive change, but just imagine 98,000BC (or thereabouts).

* Time magazine has caved in and handed over a confidential source. This article explains why this is a dangerous thing (although some of the commenters present the other side of the argument rather well). The problem of journalistic confidentiality isn’t going to go away.

*The women of Kuwait have made some great political advances in the past few months. This article sums them up and also has interesting figures on international representation. I didn’t know that 49 per cent of the Rwandan MPs are female.

* A popular medieval history magazine in French, Les Temps Medievaux. (Now I must get back to my French studies, soon …)

It’s ages since I read this now, but I did want to record a couple of snippets from A Life of Colette: Secrets of the Flesh, by Judith Thurman …

* It’s often forgotten that Colette was very much a journalist as well as a novelist. “She would be one of the first women to report from the front lines of World War I, and go up in an airship and an aeroplane. One of her specialties would be crime, particularly domestic violence, and criminal psychology, and she would cover some of the great trials of the century.” (p. 218)

* As the row ignited by Jacques Chirac over English food rages, we should perhaps be thankful he wasn’t commenting on female sexuality. Thurman is referring particularly to Colette’s The Ripening Seed, which a New York Review of Books review (full text requires payment) says contains her defining lines: “Ces plaisirs qu’on nomme, a la legere, physiques” (these pleasures lightly called physical.)

The biographer says: “At least since the Puritan revolution, and probably since the reign of the first Elizabeth, ambitious Anglo-Saxon daughters have been taught that their greatest worldy leverage – the route to influence in art, politics, or anywhere else in the public sphere – lies in abstention. Despite misogynistic laws and traditions, French culture ultimately prizes and respects sexual appetite and daring in women and, as these women age, values their prowess and wisdom – one reason Colette would become a national treasure.” (p. 316-7)

Is there some truth in that? I suspect there is, but looking at yesterday’s post, perhaps the absence (and always lesser importance) of the nunnery as an alternative for Englishwomen, meant celibacy IN society, as opposed to outside it, was a significant option, which it wasn’t in France – have to think about that one.

* But I have to admit, I struggled to really sympathise with the woman who “had always been a misogynist, but she became an increasingly entrenched one. In 1928 Colettette had published a polemical pamphlet entitled ‘Why I Am Not A Feminist’, explaining in her preface that ‘I have never had any confidence in women, the eternal feminine having betrayed me from the outset in the guise of my mother’.” (p. 381)

She seems, like too many successful women, to have preferred to regard herself as exceptional, above the rest of the female half of the human race. So no, I’m not a fan.