A few hours ago, a few hundred meters away

Around 1 o'clock today armed robbers stole four paintings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice. It was two Brueghel, one Sisley and one Monet. At that time I was only a few hundred meters away. I get a strange feeling from events at locations where I have been, when they are reported in national or international media.

I had read in the newspapers for several days about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, before I realised that I actually had been to Minneapolis once. I had not passed that particular bridge, but I knew perfectly well where it was.

But I was even more moved when I travelled by train around continental Europe in 1980. I spent a lot of time in waiting rooms at stations, waiting for trains, obviously, and sometimes sorting my things out, reading about available hotel rooms and things to see in the city I arrived to. This was before internet, so my news sources were limited to good old paper newspapers.

The third of August I arrived in Bologna. Following my habit I looked for the waiting room, but could not find it. It did not really surprise me, because the station was a mess, with something that looked like building works ongoing everywhere. I walked to the city centre, bought a newspaper and sat down at a café to read it. It was only then that I realised what had happened at the station. It was the strage di Bologna, a terrorist bomb which had killed or injured close to 300 persons in and around the waiting room of the railway station the day before. If I had arrived one day earlier, there was a pretty good chance that I would not be able to sit here typing this blog right now.

Of course I did not know at the time that there one day would be an internet or blogs, but the closeness of the event disturbed me.

This does not make me special in any way of course. There must have been thousands of people who were equally close to being in that waiting room. And thousands of thousands of people get the opportunity to feel lucky each year, when they narrowly escape terrorists, accidents or natural catastrophes. The positive message is that if you ever get close to a catastrophe, it is much more likely that you narrowly escape it than that you perish in it.