Our managers evacuated our offices at 4pm today; everyone was found, no-one I know has been hurt. The bombs were strange and depressing and somehow routine: even the bus-drivers rushing back, unwilling to take passengers, seemed familiar.

I was at a meeting last night addressed by two of Ken Livingstone's policy officers. One asked in passing - what if there's a second bomb? No-one responded, none of us wanted to even consider the possibility.

There is already a vicious anti-Muslim backlash. Colleagues at the Mayor's office report that racist incidents and attacks are being reported at the rate of 100 per day. 

I work in Higher Education: the Minister Bill Rammell has urged universities to monitor their Muslim student groups and their foreign students. The government has also announced plans to compile an 'index' of extremists: the language of Inquisition being no doubt intentional. 

The BNP boast of having distributed 300,000 copies of a leaflet responding to the bombings; a work colleague reports that there has been a small BNP group on his estate in the West Midlands for years; last weekend for the first time they felt confident to hold a public meeting.

Another story: a black race activist of two decades' standing described to me taking a phone call from her sister: she was on a London bus and saw a man reading the Koran; she had to fight to keep her nerve.

People have spoken of a comparison with 1974: when the Birmingham bombings so traumatised the Irish community that no St. Patrick's day marches could be held in the city for the next 15 years.

The government and the newspapers put an extraordinary psychological pressure on all Irish people to denounce the killings, and to applaud all the injustices that followed.

Another comparison is with the events of 1947, when members of the Jewish Irgun fighting in Palestine murdered two British soldiers near Natanya. Anti-Jewish riots followed, with 230 attacks on property in Liverpool alone, and hundreds more in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and Swansea.

The people who continue to bomb Iraq will remain unpunished and in office. But without the legacy of Muslim and secular unity expressed in the great anti-war marches, everything could be even worse.

23 July: Everyone at edge

As I write, our estate is bathed in blue flashing light, not the police, but an engine called to put out a fire. It is symptomatic of how everyone seems to be feeling, that my heart raced and I worried about something worse.

A friend was in London last week. She writes, 'As my week went on, I was more and more aware of the pain going on around me, and coming across grieving relatives and mounds of flowers in Russell Square Gardens had a profound effect on me. Everyone is full of stories and examples of those who just missed the bombs.'

I think about the man who was killed yesterday at Stockwell station. We don't yet know his name. Eyewitnesses report that he locked stocky, Asian. We now know that he was in fact Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian. He was held prone and then executed with five shots to the head. 'One down, three to go' was the headline in the Sun. Just hours ago, the Metropolitan police released a statement confirming that the man they killed had no connections at all to the bombs. 

The fear of more bombings, the fear of such violent policing, the anxiety that we could have weeks ahead of us with more of these stories; everyone talks about Londoners' calm, but I see other signs.