NOW THE real shock. The first suicide bombing to occur in Western Europe — and not one, but four of them. This takes terror in Britain into a new dimension.

And yet, my instinct is the same as it was before learning that these were not just “ordinary” bombers, but suicides. And the instinct is even stronger now: do not glamorise them. I see four pathetic young men, feeble manifestations of confused masculinity, too spineless to negotiate the 21st century. Unemployed? Useless? Do something that makes you feel big. But anyone can make a bomb and take it on to the Tube. It is the work of an instant and of a deluded idiot. We should not glamorise them, and any who might follow them. We must not dignify them with fear.

I see their poor mothers, too, wondering, as the parade of missing and dead filled our television screens, where their sons had got to. And I ask those mothers: why did you not know what was happening to your sons? I ask their fathers, too, and their community leaders who allow such bile to fester in communities impenetrable to outsiders and kept separate from mainstream British society: do you see what you have done?

And then I ask my fellow commuters: are we afraid now?

The aftermath of Thursday’s bombing showed London at its best and by God I was proud of it; proud of the calm and the silence and, above all, of people’s determination to cling to normality. I heard polite attempts to cancel appointments, apologies at missed meetings, efforts not to further inconvenience anyone. People were relentlessly practical. We left the tears and the panic to those out of town, or overseas; those irritating e-mails from people you hadn’t seen for years — are you OK? Is so-and-so all right? Do you think she was caught up in it? It was hysterical and it didn’t help.

There has always been danger on the Underground. As someone who grew up in London, to me the Tube has long represented both freedom and threat. Freedom, because it led to everywhere. Threat, because there was always the flasher, the potential rapist or the mugger; at journey’s end, the IRA bomber. The difference since 9/11 has been the sense of danger from a bomb on the Tube itself. It lurks at the back of one’s mind on almost every journey. It lurked on July 6. It lurked yesterday. It will lurk again today. You calibrate the threat, and you make your choice. For most Londoners, that means getting on the Tube.

Yesterday morning I watched, along with my fellow passengers, the comers and goers at each station. I checked sideways for packages on the floor. Occasionally people caught one another’s eye and smiled. No one but a nutter smiles on the Tube, as a rule; since July 7 we all do. Ruefully, perhaps, but a smile nonetheless. It makes me even prouder. Defeat us? You have united us. But today I imagine we shall stop smiling at one another. No more looking for reassurance in a stranger: do not look young and Asian on the Tube today.

On Monday Tony Blair painted us ordinary Londoners as heroic: “Millions of people are coming to work with a steely determination that is genuinely remarkable.” It isn’t remarkable. Nobody feels remarkable. It is just life. It is ordinary. People have jobs and they must turn up for them. It is absolutely normal.

And normality is what we need now. Normality shows that life goes on; most importantly, it reveals to other potential bombers that they cannot change anything this way.

Yet normality is hard to carry on when those in authority keep raking through the rubble. The police leak details of hidden horrors; we are invited to imagine the scene underground at King’s Cross, in the sweat and the stench. Gruesome hints about the difficulty of identifying bodies spattered across track and tunnel are sharply illustrated by the collection of a toothbrush, for DNA, from a potential victim’s relative. A distraught mother seeking her missing son is given an entire page in the Daily Mail to bemoan “rivers of blood . . . death in the morning, people going to find their livelihood, death in the noontime in the highways and streets”. Mr Blair invites grim imaginings by telling MPs “the effect of a bomb is to make identification sometimes very, very hard and harrowing”. The Culture Secretary rushes to open a Garden of Remembrance. The Prime Minister announces a Europe-wide two-minute silence and the Queen promises to attend a memorial service.

And all this risks glamorising the work of four pathetic young men, and recruiting others to their “cause”. The shock of the blasts tore lives apart, yes, but they were not, for most of us, our lives. We are not grieving, as the friends and families of the bereaved grieve. Nothing will ever fill for them the void left by July 7, 2005. Public mourning will not bring them back; public grieving belittles their grief.

It is now clear that there is something constructive that the politicians can do. Forget the mourning, and tear into those Muslim ghettos instead. Force them to open up. Make the imams answer. Tell them to let their women speak, as they have been prevented from doing until now. We have done softly, softly. We have pandered to fears about religious hatred. We have listened with utmost sympathy to their concerns.

No one should stigmatise any community, the police said yesterday. But those bombers have stigmatised the communities that made them, and we should spare a thought for the devastation wrought on those communities; but then we should insist that they cannot continue in a state of alienation from the rest of society. That is a challenge for them, and for all of us. They, too, must become ordinary.

JOIN THE DEBATE
Send your e-mails via www.timesonline.co.uk/debate

Times Recommends

• You created the job. You should do it
• A swindler with a ready maid plan
• Charming to pillory disabled Brown