Normality returns, quietly and warily

LONDON - On the footpath outside King's Cross station, several hundred bunches of summer flowers are piling up at a fenced-off, makeshift shrine to the victims of the London bombings.

The press pack mills in a dozen different languages; coloured leads spill along the gutters from dozens of TV cameras.

Bystanders rubberneck under the gaze of policemen, and tourists take photos; it is, for all the wrong reasons, a memorable time to be in London.

Just inside the shrine, in dog collar and sober suit, King's Cross parish priest Nicholas Wheeler stands by.

Silas Eziehi, 31, and his wife Minna Haimi, 30, walk past him, arms tightly around each other's shoulders. They stoop together as he tenderly lays down a single, red rose and a handwritten note in anguished capitals: WHY THE POOR?

"Sadness" brought them here, says Mr Eziehi, sighing. "If they [terrorists] really want to fight, they should fight the Government, not the poor and the masses."

The couple don't know anyone touched by the blasts. But Mr Eziehi works on the live underground tracks at King's Cross and knows that his 5am finish the day of the bombings was a lucky escape.

Over his shoulder on the side of a bus shelter, the pixie face of Karolina Gluck gazes from a "missing" poster. Four days after she was last seen, the banalities of her life are crucial: "A black handbag, keys with a London 2012 key ring, a pack of cigarettes, a silver mobile phone with a screensaver of falling autumn leaves."

But away from the blast sites shielded by thick plastic sheets, away from their throngs of emergency vehicles and forensic workers, life continues as normal, just more quietly and warily.

"When you get on the Tube," says cameraman Phil Cartwright, one of the Russell Square media pack, "everyone checks you out."

King's Cross Tube and overland stations are still busy, though numbers are down, according to staff.

Israeli tourist Orit Abraham, staying in Russell Square, hasn't changed her plans. From suburban Tel Aviv, she is used to terrorist threats: "You have to have caution, but you can't closet yourself away."

London's road traffic has slumped since the bombings, reducing the normal din; locals say the city's infamously polluted air is fresher for it.

The thousands of people living inside police cordons can still come and go; they have to prove their address with, say, a power bill, and wait until an officer can escort them home.

Turn your back to the cordons and things look and feel reassuringly normal.

"What else can you do?" shrugs Lisa Simpson, as she leaves her bunch of bright flowers under snapping police tape at Russell Square. "I don't know what else to. Life is going on, if a bit more quietly.

"People don't want it to get to them, because then the terrorists have won."