Cosmopolitan city with rule of silence

IF THOSE responsible for this week's bombs in the capital were trying to strike against dominant western culture, they could not have picked a worse target than a London bus.

In 1903, Lord Justice Bowen referred to "the man on the Clapham omnibus". Then, this indicated a mythic Everyman, a touchstone of a city and a nation that were overwhelmingly white and nominally Christian.

Today, it means a Polish scaffolder, a Senegalese mother, an Antiguan grandfather, an Italian waitress, an Australian lawyer, and me.

Every morning and evening I use the 88 bus to get between my home in Clapham and the House of Commons. On any given half-hour journey I can hear a dozen languages being spoken, and I could not begin to guess how many nationalities or religions are represented on each double-decker.

Yesterday morning was no different from any other, except that if anything, there was less traffic than usual, and the journey took barely 20 minutes.

As usual, I boarded and clambered up the stairs to sit in perfect solitude among a couple of dozen strangers, all wrapped in self-absorbed isolation.

This is the rule of London: you do not speak to other people on public transport. You can read, you can have surprisingly personal conversations on mobile phones, you can stare out of the window. But you cannot speak, and not even a terrorist attack can break that stricture.

Yesterday, there was one ripple of anxiety when, just short of Vauxhall and the MI6 building, a heavily bearded man wearing a white robe and sandals climbed to the top deck and sat muttering quietly to himself as he read what I assume was the Koran.

Not long after he sat down, the top deck was shaken from its isolation. Heads turned. Eyes narrowed. A hint of tension.

Islamophobia at large? A people scarred by terrorism? Hardly. The heads were turning to the young man in a suit sitting next to our bearded fellow-traveller. His mobile phone was emitting a more than normally irritating squawk, a noise he was ignoring because his ears were occupied by his iPod.

The man with the Koran looked annoyed too, but he didn't say a thing. It's the rule.