7/7

Jacqui Putnam was caught up in the 7/7 bombing atrocity and has since set up the Inquiry Group campa

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.