Very very superscary

Several scary things:

Scary thing 1
Yesterday there was some kind of security alert centered around Bank Underground station. A lot of people I know were caught up in it in some way (my line goes through there, so me too). Nobody was making any announcements as I travelled the system, no staff on hand. The ViL reports that the Oxford Circus area was full of police in and out of the station, some armed with fully automatic weapons.

I'm writing as I dash between meetings and there have certainly been lots of cops in high visibility vests between King's Cross and Victoria today.

Scary thing 2
A colleague happens to live nearish the Hemel Hempstead fuel depot fire and she was telling me about it today. She was awoken by a loud bang Sunday morning, and the sky was a freaky yellow in one direction and blue in the other.

Despite ominous headlines in the local papers "Toxic clouds over London tonight" kind of thing, I've seen little evidence of it. The weather has been fair and I haven't noticed any beathing difficulties which can't be attributed to smoking or my daily commute on the Underground (which health officials equate to smoking some astonishing number of cigarettes).

However, today it's been drizzlling and I do worry that the particulates will fall out in the rain and get that oily, sooty mess on my new coat.

Scary thing 3
This morning when I was drying off from the shower a big giant spider (at least the size of a silver dollar) crawled out of the folds of my towel toward the naked, still damp flesh of my shoulder. I am not normally scared of spiders and can generally cohabit with them quite happily, but this MF was huge! I did scream and the Vol-in-Law came running. The spider had hidden in the towel again but when he saw the giant spider he yelped, too.

Neither of us felt able to deal with it, so we sicced the nearest cat on said spider. Fancy was a little trepidatious, but she killed it in the end - our little feline heroine! (Though sadly she did not eat the whole spider so there was a bit of a disposal job).