Pete's extensive travels in the United Kingdom

I've visited the counties in yellow. Which counties have you visited? made by marnanel map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data by permission of the Ordnance Survey. © Crown copyright 2001.

OK. That's Heathrow, eight magic days in walking distance of St Pauls, and Thameslink to Gatwick.

More to follow.

London Bombs

As soon as I heard the details of the squibbed explosions, I knew it was a major breakthrough. The would-be suicide bombers had about as much chance of escaping as the proverbial snowflake. And once the police began questioning them, all sorts of leads would open up.

Obviously the explosive wasn't. During my time in uniform I got to play around with all sorts of things that went bang, and when I was a sergeant I was the bloke in the regiment charged with destroying things that didn't go bang when they should have. This mostly consisted of wrapping placcy around the mine/shell/grenade, sticking in a detonator, lighting the fuse and retiring to a safe distance. The key to getting it all to work is to use explosions to trigger increasingly less sensitive explosives. Detonators are pretty sensitive, and will explode without much effort. We were trained to "crimp" them to the fuse by holding the pliers off to one side, so if the act of crimping set them off, they wouldn't blow off anything too important.

The circular primer was less sensitive, and the slab or plastic was about as safe as you could get. You can throw placcy around, burn it, drop it, run over it with a tank and it won't go off.

And then the mortar round or grenade or whatever. You'd aim the destruction at the most sensitive point, generally the fuze. End result was always a satisfying bang and a nice clean crater when you went back to check.

So what happened in this latest incident was that the det triggered the primer (because a det wouldn't have enough force to blow out windows by itself - you can safely set them off under a sandbag) but the main charge didn't fire. The would-be suicide bomber is left alive with everyone looking at him. Lots of eyewitnesses, DNA, personal possessions, fingerprints, so even if he gets away from the immediate scene, it's only a matter of time.

And then you catch him and start looking at what he's been doing and who he's been talking to.

Whoosh! It went right over my head!

The Australian War Memorial dedicated a new memorial sculpture to the men of Bomber Command today. It's in the form of a searchlight beam, a tall metal cone - with a searchlight inside it for night time.

About 1220 I went outside and warned DS, jumping up and down on his trampoline, that there would be a flypast of an F-111 at half-past. And we waited for it, relaxing in the sun with the animals stalking each other around us. DD came home from shopping in Queanbeyan, with tales of how Kerri had just kept on talking as a 737 flew over them onto the runway as they passed. Normally she and I would pull over and watch it come in, but Kerri doesn't care much for planes.

And there it was, skimming over the trees - that swing-wing shape as it roared up Anzac Parade. Our eyes followed it and as it passed over the War Memorial, there was an odd little puff of smoke and it zoomed upwards over Mount Ainslie, shrinking into a dot in the sky until we lost it in the glare.

I think it must have released someone's ashes over the memorial - I can't think of any other reason for a sudden puff of grey-white at precisely that point.

I finish Harry Potter this morning, taking just under a week to get through it. DS is the only one who hasn't finished it, and he's got other books ahead of him.

Now I've got to get back to Mount Tobee.