‘I do wish bombs would stop going off near me in Madrid’ – was probably the wrong text message to send to my wife, at least that’s what she told me when my mobile rand 20 seconds later. But it’s true. We were 200 m away from Atotcha station when the bombs went off there on March 11th last year, blowing apart train carriages and many of the people inside them. I recognise the sound of a bomb now, a booming iron thud, quite different from any of the other booms one hears in Madrid (like the sound of an empty skip dropped on tarmac).
What I really wish is that bombs would stop going off anywhere, near me or not. It is all quite unfathomable. I wonder what ETA hoped to achieve with this? Perhaps El Mundo can explain it to me later on. More on this later in a podcast…
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 