AS THE bomb went off, the plate-glass window of Davy's Wine Bar shuddered for several seconds and just failed to splinter.
Across the table my Scots friend Alec, veteran of scores of wars in Africa, remarked coolly: "I could have got a big shard of, glass in my head. Think of it, decapitated over the lager!"
Some of the customers - many, like myself, journalists serving newspapers with offices in the enormous Canary Wharf tower building near us - paused over their post-work drinks and walked across the floor, fashionably spread with sawdust, into the street.
Had one of the largest buildings in the world been hit? We looked anxiously up and wondered if masonry would fall on us.
The consensus was that any explosion on the south side of the Canary Wharf complex, which had nearly shattered the plate glass of premises we were sitting in on the north side of the tower, must have been massive indeed, given that there were 50 storeys of steel, concrete and dark pink marble between the explosive and us.
I walked across the still desolate expanses of disused dock and building site in the massive development conceived a decade ago by two secretive Canadian Jewish entrepreneurs. The alarm lights started to flash in the surrounding streets
The yellow lights of the clanging fire engines on the approach roads were mirrored in the dead waters of the disused dock. The private police who control the Canary Wharf complex - a private city within a city - brought down their barriers to traffic and gathered in knots outside their cubby holes to discuss bewilderedly with bystanders what might have happened.
The shuttle bus which links Canary Wharf with London City airport, a brave aeronautical venture built on the remains of disused warehouses a mile or so away and which was recently bought by Irish investors, shuttled by with - as usual - no one in it.
By this time some of those who had been in the tower had reached the ground by the stair, cases and were trying to piece together bemusedly what had occurred.
I gave thanks that I had not been caught on the 18th floor of the tower in the newsroom of the London Independent, where I had been an hour previously.
As one who has difficulty with heights at the best of times but with no thought of any bomb, I had moved uncomfortably away from the window and the hundreds of yards of drop into the dock below me.
Looking towards the site of the explosion, some 200 yards away across waste ground strewn with concrete mixers, cranes and steel pilings, where some year soon the London Underground Jubilee line will make its appearance and link this isolated patch of ground with the rest of the city, there was little to see. No ball of smoke in the sky around the tower, no flames; just the yellow and green flashing lights of the emergency services.
As I drove away the police barriers were going up and the radio was pouring out the first news of the blast. A journalist was hoping that his former colleagues on the Daily Telegraph were out of harm's way.
Hundreds of thousands of Londoners must have shared his thoughts as the capital braced itself for what looked like a resumption of the bombing campaign which had made it a place of fear for years.
Bruton says resumption unjustified