The way events echo through history holds a deep fascination. What we see in remnants, like the archaeological record, fragments of ancient letters and books, has a deep romance inspired both by the sense of mystery that is involved and the fact that we consciously invoke it. In 2001 I found such a fragment, a coverless exercise book in an Al Qaeda training camp in Kandahar, written in English by a nameless trainee in the business of bomb making whose intention – it seemed from the scrawled notes – was to return to the UK to undertake a mission that involved a massive van bomb.
All that was available as an insight into the nature of this man was what he had written and his uncertain efforts to follow the instructions of his tutor, recorded in different coloured biros. From that I had to reconstruct an idea of his character. A process as unsatisfactory as the hunt for clues in his text was compelling. The footnote to the discovery of the book came several years later. As it had suggested Moorgate in the City of London as a target, I felt compelled to show it to a British diplomat as I left Afghanistan.
Much later, my friend and colleague, the journalist Martin Bright, then home affairs editor of The Observer, informed me that it had re-appeared as proof of the “threat” to the UK. It was a threat, insisted the government, that required a number of figures deemed as security threats to be kept under emergency detention rules. An unanticipated consequence. Echo of an event in its own right.
I was reminded of the notebook yesterday by a phenomenon that was entirely unconnected: thinking about the waves I had been surfing in North Cornwall, remnant and reminder in themselves of a distant weather event. The periodicity of waves is the first and most telling clue. The bigger the gap between the waves, the further they have travelled and the more powerful and better shaped they tend to be. Waves with a short period tend to have been produced by more localised events, recent storm winds close by, for instance, and tend to be weaker. Yet there remains something inscrutable about these natural events, no matter how far back through weather maps we can trace their genesis or break them down with science.
Because sometimes all that is necessary is that you immerse yourself in the echo.
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