The overwhelming smell of flowers and preserved fruit, that first, shockingly corrosive, over-carbonated swill. The next sip, the cough from the inhaled foam, the sickening tightening in the pit of your stomach. The gradually sweeter, patent medicinal taste that builds with each new mouthful. That slightly worrisome pricking behind your corneas. The familiar rush that pulls you taut, the predictable, slackening crash.
Oh, Red Bull. How I've missed you.

Dozens dead, hundreds wounded, multiple explosions undergound, and the Tube will be running tomorrow morning, in time for the rush hour.
In a certain way, this was a success for whoever planted these bombs, in that people died gruesomely on television, and London was conclusively proven to be a 'soft target'.
In a larger sense though, it was a complete failure. There was absolutely no fear in anyone I spoke to today. Once the initial wash of panicked attempts to locate relatives and friends subsided, people just got on with the day. The first thing I heard about it was one of my managers joking that he 'didn't think the French were that angry [about the Olympics].' Another manager who grew up in Belfast described watching the elderly clerk at a shoe store ringing up a pair of expensive boots as a bomb went off next door that shook the floor and moved the till...she didn't even blink as she made the change and closed the register. After the Troubles, not to mention the Second World War, people here aren't prone to the kind of crippling terror that grips cities that have never been attacked. As soon as the inter-city trains started to run, people made their way back into London, and found their way home but whatever means they could, on foot or on buses.
The government here has done the only sensible thing, in my mind, and put their collective fingers up at whoever is responsible, ordering (if my swarthy, Tory-connected source is to be trusted) that the transport system be combed overnight, and open for business by sunrise tomorrow morning. What's more, I'd put money on it being just as hard for me to get a seat as it always is.