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7/7

Jacqui Putnam

Published 10 May 2007

Jacqui Putnam was caught up in the 7/7 bombing atrocity and has since set up the Inquiry Group campaigning for an independent probe into the attacks

Ten years ago I had a choice of jobs in IT as an analyst/programmer, marriage, great children, a good life.

Then jobs in my area of expertise became rare. I learned new scary words: ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring’. My husband changed profession and took a driving job.

I’d been poor before and this wasn’t it. We adjusted.

Then came, one after the other like bullets, the car accident (mine), bereavement (mine again), the affair (his, with a close friend) and the divorce.

Recovering, I thought I’d been tested to the limit. I was wrong.

One morning in July I stepped onto a Circle Line train one carriage away from Mohammed Sidique Khan carrying a rucksack full of explosive. The filthy, blood-stained, traumatised woman who climbed out of the bombed wreckage at Edgeware Road was not the same person who got on at King’s Cross.

It’s taken me almost two years to navigate the wasteland that is the aftermath of the London bombings, but I do now have the thread of a belief that there is a future, and that it can even be a good one. I just hope Tony Blair isn’t part of it. That man’s a jinx.

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2 comments from readers

Jgeorge
10 May 2007 at 18:14

Jacqui, I wonder what you make of Blair's leaving speech today? Is it enough that he always did what he thought was right?

Jacqui Putnam
11 May 2007 at 15:04

I wasn't impressed with Blair's leaving speech, and have reservations about his having done 'what he thought was right' (his words). This, after all, is the man who, in the face of evidence of gross error and possible incompetence, is refusing an independent inquiry into events leading up to the London bombings. It begs the question 'right for whom?'.

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About the writer

Jacqui Putnam

Since 7/7, Jacqui Putnam has joined the Red Cross as a volunteer First Aider for Disaster Response, and is one of the founder members of the 7/7 Inquiry Group campaigning for an independent inquiry into events leading up to the London bombings.

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