SO THE IDEA was, two weeks after the bombings, to investigate whether London’s visitors can still enjoy our terror-torn capital. I was instructed to spend the day as a tourist in my own city, mooch around the Trocadero, queue for Madame Tussauds, and feast on Garfunkels’s salad bar.

I can’t say I was thrilled about this assignment: most Londoners would find walking into a sex shop and purchasing a butt-plug less embarrassing than being taken for a tourist. On the occasions when I have, owing to my poor sense of direction, temporarily forgotten the whereabouts of, say, Bond Street, I have felt obliged to ask for directions in a Scandinavian accent.

I began my tourist day trip at Harrods, since I don’t know a single Londoner who shops there and I recall as a teenage tourist myself trying to work out the cheapest item I could buy that would secure me a prestigious green and gold carrier bag. Today it might be a Scottie dog fridge magnet “made in China for Harrods”. What a depressing store this is, somehow both stratospherically overpriced and shamefully tacky, all those “rooms of luxury” piled high with perfume gift packs, like some vast duty-free shop.

I watched grateful Americans locate the in-store Krispy Kreme Donut stand before reluctantly heading for the bus stop outside. Not to board good old London Transport, but the open-top tour bus that would take me on a carefree loop around the capital. Twenty quid for a day pass! But it did include a river boat and a movie location walk where I might traverse the same “zebra crossing that Renée Zellweger famously crosses in Bridget Jones”. And rather than the surly grunt you get as you board a red double-decker, this driver cracked funnies as he handed me a headset.

On the top deck I joined two German women, a New Zealander and his teenage daughter and a vast Indian extended family, including a woman tightly grasping a newborn baby. As we bowled past the Albert Memorial, our headphones filled with a blast of Churchill’s fight’em-on-the-beaches speech set to a weird Portishead-esque ambient backing track. This was followed by God Save the Queen.

Then the commentator, in an accent almost incomprehensibly posh and fruity — like Martin Jarvis doing a Nancy Mitford duke — pointed out London landmarks. Strange to note how the once-dangerous and outré are eventually co-opted into theme-park London. Chelsea was Mary Quant and her miniskirt, and the Sex Pistols inventing punk rock. Kensington, however, was only Diana, Princess of Wales.

As we breezed past J. M. Barrie’s home on Bayswater Road, the baby was sick over its mother’s shoulder. The German women sniggered. And then my mobile phone interrupted the commentary. It was my husband telling me the first sketchy details about four bombs in Central London.

Not again. Hadn’t we had our dose of terrorism? And this was at lunchtime. We non-commuters had convinced ourselves that we had figured out the pattern. Travel off-peak and we’ll be fine. But now they want to bomb children in school holidays and women buying sofas near Warren Street. What were the rules now? At Paddington, I craned my neck over the side of the bus to see police barricading the Tube station. The father in the Indian family filmed the chaos on his camcorder.

Tourism is a state of mental detachment. Your host country is merely a backdrop for the greater drama of your personal adventure. Before I travel, I fantasise about all manner of horrors — tsunamis, children stricken with encephalitis, car wrecks, hijacks — yet once on holiday, I feel nothing bad could ever befall me. I relax into uncharacteristic complacency, take seatbeltless Third World taxis and disdain malaria pills.

And so my fellow passengers were only mildly interested in the bombs. The New Zealander said that he’d been in “the last one” on July 7, and was also evacuated after a bomb scare in the Disneystore in Paris. It would all be a tale to tell. One of the German women came over with her map and asked me to point out the bombed Tube stations. Not, it seemed, for fear that we were passing near to danger, but because it was somehow part of this wacky open-top adventure.

Then, while sirens shrieked from every direction and unmarked police cars sped the wrong way down three-lane highways, the tourists put their headsets back on: “And the most famous resident of Baker Street is the detective Sherlock Holmes . . . ” At Park Lane we changed buses and our new driver merely said to expect “the traffic to go to pot a bit” as we headed down Oxford Street towards Warren Street Tube.

I reasoned that I was probably safer here than anywhere in London. My bus didn’t have a roof to blow off and while aboard I was travelling in a parallel universe: this was to London Transport as Hogwarts Express is to National Rail.

But by Portland Place — “passing the exquisite Nash church of All Souls” — it was too weird to bear. I was feverishly wondering what would be next — a Bali in a London club, a Beslan in my children’s school — and the New Zealanders were speculating if there would be a disruption to that evening’s West End show.

I got off outside Hamleys and headed to Warren Street to join the mostly foreign press pack who, as detached as the tourists, were greeting the news that this was a minor bomb, no bodies, with palpable disappointment. Just off Fitzroy Square, a journalist-tourist hybrid — a vacationing ABC reporter in shorts and flip-flops — filed straight to air from her mobile phone. Passing our throng all the time were businessmen sweating in suits, an old lady struggling with a pull-along case, real Londoners turfed off the Tube, wondering — yet again — how the hell they’d get home.

I tried to rejoin my open-top adventure, but the service had been suspended. Sitting gingerly on the top deck of a real London bus, I reflected on the vacuity of the bold “we are not afraid” declarations of the past fortnight. You’d have to be a tourist not to fear living in a city where commuters and bombers now engage in hand-to-hand combat. When I got home two hours later my seven-year-old asked: “Were you near the bombs today, Mummy?” And the only answer I could honestly give was, “Well, yes and no”.

janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk

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