Quite upsetting just reading about the victims who've been named (many the same names read out previously as missing that family were looking for info for). One a schoolgirl from a small village I briefly worked in. Another an eight year old girl from a tiny village a couple of miles from here. This just feels so close to home. I'd been to the MEN many times before, my parents had been there last week. Yesterday in the pub it was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about - I spoke to one supplier on the phone to place a drinks order and got to talking and she said she had a friend who'd been at the concert (thankfully she already knew her friend was OK).

Terrorism is one of those things that always seems so distant and unlikely unless you live in a big city, though coming from a town synonymous with an IRA bomb in 93 I've always known it could strike at home ... it just doesn't seem likely. At the end of the Troubles this seemed like something we'd put behind us, even with the trouble in Paris and elsewhere lately apart from the 7/7 attack in London there's a false sense of security in it being "over there". This just makes it feel more real again.

Blowing up school children, whether its for your political cause that you blow up a school child and a pre schooler on Mother's Day, or children attending a Nickelodeon star's pop concert for your warped god, is sick no matter how you slice it. Bastards the lot of them.