Yesterday, I travelled back to my hometown for the first time since the shootings a few weeks ago. The press have now gone, moved onto a different story, the funerals of the victims are nearly are nearly complete and as I expected, life has gone on.
Walking round the town centre this morning, there was nothing to suggest something terrible had happened. A brass band played in the market area, card shops spill over with people buying Father's Day cards and my mother seems to know at least one person on every street.
It would more that than likely be the same had it been any other town. Hungerford was probably the same when the same kind of incident happened there. But walking from my parents' house to town reminds me how much Whitehaven has been hit over recent years. Sellafield continues to cut jobs, a textile factory at the bottom of our road has been shut down and demolished and the gap on the horizon were a chemical works once stood still strikes me as strange.
I'm aware, again, that Whitehaven is not the only one-time industrial town to suffer like this. There are countless others across Britain, pretty much forgotten about and left on the scrapheap. It's unlikely anything will change with a new government, so all the people can do is shrug, try to carry on and wonder who'll play in goal for England tonight.
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