Howard Jacobson: What a week to be a Londoner

In the past week, the capital has experienced extremes of elation and despair. But it has also rediscovered its sense of itself - a sense that will serve it well in this dangerous time

And we danced by the light of the moon, the moon, and we danced by the light of the moon. Was that only one little week ago, the euphoria of being in a city that wasn't only going to change the world, but seemingly, for a day at least, had become the world? Where else was there to be last Saturday? What event of any importance was there that wasn't happening here? All on the one day, the women's final at Wimbledon, England holding Australia to a tie at Lords, the Live8 concert at Hyde Park, the Gay Pride parade and rally finishing at Trafalgar Square and then spilling out into Soho where I live, and, at the Purcell Room on the South Bank - my own particular event of choice that Saturday - the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain wowing us to the music of small guitars.

All on a single summer's day. I love London at this time of the year, whatever's happening. I love the way you can name your desires and go in search of the means to satisfy them. But when the entire city is pleasure bent as it was last week, every stadium in use, all the parks and commons fizzing with fairs and barbecues and concerts, a major exhibition in every gallery, a fête in the gardens of every church, and the whole world come to gaze and marvel, London is very heaven.

I had strong reservations about Live8. I did not care for the way the press had capitulated both to its sheer pulling power and to the simplicity of its politics. Had that been Billy Graham whipping up the crowds and not Geldof, we'd have had something else to say. But what the hell. A party was a party was a party. And there'd be time enough to sober up in the morning. I had my reservations about London hosting the Olympics too, largely of the not wanting to be the one who paid for it sort, but the Red Arrows flew overhead and suddenly even the skies belonged to us.

And then the bombs went off. Strange how you can be simultaneously shocked and not. It was almost as though the whole week had been nothing but a preparation for this. Wisdom is meant to prepare us for such reverses. Call no man happy, as the tragedians say. They who go to bed with hope are sure to wake in the arms of despair. It was even tempting to see a sort of punishment in it: our fault for forgetting that the lot of man is misery. Our fault for being stuffed with our own too muchness. Our fault, George Galloway has said, for being in Iraq. And that grossness, too, is all part of the saga. At some point, someone like Galloway was always going to make the guilty innocent of their crime.

My wife missed the explosion in Tavistock Square by minutes. People running was the first she knew of it. And a girl sitting on a doorstep, crying. She had been on the bus. Yes, she was all right, she said. She had not been injured. She just needed time to sit. But she seemed not to know what to do. What do you do? Most people reached for their mobile phones. What you do is tell someone you are safe. But lines were jammed, and the telephones in the street were taking emergency calls only. Tapping away at my computer, excoriating the feelgood of Live8, I did not even know that anything untoward had happened until my wife returned, a little white, a little shaken. She had left a message on my phone, but I didn't get it for another 12 hours. There must be circumstances in which a long-delayed message, saying that someone is safe, or saying that someone is not, will break the heart. It makes my hair stand on end still, there being a message on my phone and my not getting it. And her being so close to the mayhem. You think about yourself, of course. What would I have done had she not come home? We say this to each other when we go out separately - be careful. It's more than the usual be careful. Watch the steps or mind the traffic. It's be careful of you know what, as though there's any way you can be.

In truth, we have been waiting for this ever since 9/11. You start, when you live in the centre of London, the moment you hear more police or ambulance sirens than usual, or when a car backfires. Is this it? Is this the beginning? For months after 9/11, I would walk out on to my balcony, from which I have a view of St Paul's and the City, and expect to see some significant building gone, or if not gone, going, dissolving even as I watched. We have a pattern in our mind's eye for a dissolving building now; we know how it falls in on itself, we know how it seems to suck its substance out from its own innards.

I regarded planes suspiciously too, because suddenly a plane had become a weapon. Over time, these anticipations of apocalypse turned into a duller, plainer sense of dread. Something would assuredly happen, but in the meantime you had to get on with your life. But we stopped travelling by Underground. We still do not travel by Underground. And for a while we even stocked up with cans of sardines and tomatoes in case a dirty bomb was detonated and we couldn't get out of our apartment. That was the advice a few years back. Buy cans of food, a torch, and the wherewithal to seal your doors and windows. Only recently, because they had passed their sell-by date, we threw these cans away and did not bother to replace them.

Complacent of us. But then you cannot live in a city like London without a degree of complacency. All very well to keep your eye open for anything suspicious, but what doesn't look suspicious? More to the point, in a cosmopolitan city, who doesn't look suspicious? We might not admit to suspecting people of a particular appearance, but we do. No more than an hour after the final bomb went off, a dark-complexioned man in a galabiya entered a delicatessen near me. The proprietor looked alarmed and tried to turn his anxiety into a joke. "I'm wondering if I ought to frisk you before I let you in," he said. The man in the galabiya made a better joke of it. "Well, if you're into that sort of thing," he said, "I'm game." But that's Soho. Elsewhere, the tension might be more difficult to negotiate.

As for those who told us that our fear of terrorism was misplaced - the acolytes of Michael Moore insisting it was nothing but a ruse of government to keep us all in line and more willing to accept ID cards; or Lord Hoffmann assuring us that "the real threat to the life of the nation" came from our asylum laws and not from terrorists - one can only wonder how they view the irresponsibility of their words now. It was a mystery to me at the time how anyone with the faintest imagination of disaster could ever utter the phrase "the real threat" and exclude terror from it. It beggared belief, but we swallowed it because we were high on law lords at the time, and saw them as a bulwark against Blair's supposed illiberalism. We have heard a great deal about the way politicians manipulate the propaganda of terror for their own ends; it is even more wicked politics, I believe, to tell us we are safe when we are not.

In the meantime, the capital goes about its business with commendable calm. The streets and shops emptied quickly on Thursday, but there was no siege mentality. Transport had been suspended; people needed to get home. It looked the way Sundays used to look, before we blurred the distinctions. I tried to tell myself there was an atmosphere of the end of the world about it. But that was pure melodrama.

What struck my wife on her way back from Tavistock Square was how quickly after the explosion police and ambulances were on the streets. If that means that they, too, were expecting it, I am glad. Better that the police and ambulancemen, at least, believe we are in more danger from terrorists than from our asylum laws. It is very English to rejoice in the quiet efficiency of those who manage emergencies; we are never more than a sentence away from invoking the spirit of the Blitz. I have to say, I think this is an indulgence we are allowed. It helped, of course - a grim satisfaction in the midst of horror - that the majority of the bombs went off where hospitals and doctors abounded.

But there was something about their unfussed professionalism, their quick and quiet assumption of responsibility, that made me realise what it was I hadn't liked about the rhetoric of Live8. The word "idealism" was used again and again in Geldof's campaign. At last the cynical and indifferent young were once again believing they could make the world a better place.

Ho-hum. The road to hell is paved with the ambition to make the world a better place. Hell itself is someone or other's idea of what we need to make the world a better place. This very particular hell - the bombers' hell - was indubitably their contribution to making the world, their world, anyway, a better place. Well, here on the streets of London was selflessness without conceit, humanity without any of the hoo-ha. The best idealism does not grow out of elation. Nor does it need the intoxication of numbers, or the illusion of universal brotherhood set to music, to stimulate its effectiveness. If we want to feel good about something, feel good about this: the willing assistance we give one another without demur or grudge in circumstances too dreadful to contemplate.

There appears to be a strong conviction abroad in London, not of our invincibility, but of our capacity to absorb the worst. Maybe it tends to sentimentality, but it is attractive by virtue of its plainness. You get to the bottom of a few ordinary things when an atrocity of this sort occurs.

Your friends ring you and you remember how much you miss them. The people you live with grow more dear to you as well. We are here as on a darkling plain - Ah, love, let us be true to one another. But something more steely has set in, too. Right then, we'll have those Olympics and show you what we can do with them. We expect G8 to amount to something, too. We'd like Geldof to have his desired effect. Take note that things happen when we party in this town. Take note, furthermore, that we will party again. And we'll dance by the light of the moon, the moon, and we'll dance by the light of the moon.