Plane scary

I love a caper as much as the next gal.

But waking up this morning to the news out of London was terrifying. Although my last name is France (I throw in the Lisa Respers because that’s who I was for many a year and even my husband sometimes still calls me that), I am a complete Anglophile. I can’t stop reading about Henry VIII and his tough enough daughter Elizabeth. I mystify my friends with “Little Britain” television series references (yeahbutnobutyeahbutnobutyeah) and I can’t stand the fact that The EastEnders episodes they show in the U.S. are like a bizillion years behind. Give me a British whodunit with a spot of tea and I am happier than a pig in slop. Heck, I even married a guy who is from London.

So this terror plot that has been uncovered is completely disturbing to me. It takes me back to just over a year ago when the bombings occurred. The shot of the double decker bus with the top sheared off prompted me to dash off frequent e-mails to friends who live there. I looked for landmarks to see if any of the locations were in areas that I had visited when I was there. There is also the very frightening issue for me that I live between JFK and La Guardia and planes frequently fly so low over my building that a flight attendant could toss me a bag of peanuts.

Some of the most talented crime and mystery writers call the UK home (you heard very eloquently from one yesterday) and we are reminded that we are all linked in this struggle against terror. I fear that in the future the most compelling violence we will be reading about won’t be in novels, but on the front pages of our newspapers.