It’s ten years today since Thomas Hamilton shot dead 16 pupils and their teacher in the small Scottish rural town of Dunblane.
I won’t make much of a fuss about that because the townsfolk themselves have decided not to, but I do still remember the morning I parked up outside work at Bournemouth Airport, and heard the news on the radio. It was all rather surreal, as many generations of my family (including my brothers, but not me) grew up in Dunblane; my parents were married there, some of their friends still live there, and my grandparents are buried there. Although I’d never lived there myself, I’d had enough of a connection with the place over the years to realise how utterly improbable a setting it was for such an event… but I suppose that’s what people always say.