There was real smoke out here, though: the darkness in the east, over the roofs of Bishopsgate, behind the spires of finance, where I was supposed to be. Perhaps that was the source of my fascination with the Barking fire – that, at least, was real, really happening; other people around me could see it too, it was in the papers. For the first time in months, the city was in sync with me.

Eleven a.m. – the time Alan and I were supposed to arrive at Pierce’s house. I was cold and my joints were stiff from sitting on the step. Adjacent to the station entrance was a pub.

I had been caught up in station evacuations before, as I suppose every regular Tube user has – or any regular passenger on any subway network anywhere in the world. A couple of times I had seen fire engines arrive. But I had never smelled smoke, not so much as a match’s worth, let alone the thick clouds that had almost suffocated me on the platform with Alan.

When the bombs went off on 7 July 2005, I was living in a shared house in Fulham, and working my first job. My commute, District Line to South Kensington, took me nowhere near the bombs, and I had only just left the house when it all happened. The station was already closed when I arrived, and the pavement outside was filled with a restive and palpably upset crowd. No one knew what was going on, exactly, although the look on the faces of the staff made it obvious it was no signal failure. At that moment, an early report about a gas explosion was being shown to be tragically wrong. We were told to go home, and I did, to find one of my housemates already there and full of rolling news and internet rumour. We watched together. After about half an hour, when it was completely clear that services would not be resumed, I called the office, and the phone rang unanswered. I tried my boss’s mobile – he was at home as well.

Thinking about it now, that was the first time I took an unscheduled day off work. After a couple of hours watching the news, mostly unspeaking but for occasional expletives and blasphemies, I went to the fridge, intending to make us both a cup of tea, and saw that there were four cans of Grolsch in there, left over from the weekend. (The very thought that beer could be lying untouched, forgotten, in the fridge from Sunday until Tuesday dates this memory for me.) I took two of these cans through to the living room and was hailed as a stalwart foe of extremism and a doctor of the human spirit. The kettle boiled, and cooled, without further attention. We finished those cans, and the other two, and went out for more. When our other housemate came back, he found us both convincingly drunk.