Close to home

Very soon after waking each morning I check the online newsfeed from The Guardian. Today there was a photo-carousel image that stopped me in my tracks. I called up the front page and was able to confirm that the two ferociously armed police officers are on the beach at Scarborough.

The town that in the seventeenth century became Britain's very first seaside resort has a special place in my heart. It was never exactly my home, but for the first seventeen years of my life no summer passed without a family holiday there. It was a perfect place to 'grow up', a place where not much ever happened.

Certainly Scarborough had been spared anything as horrendous as Monday's terror attack on innocents in Manchester.

Well, at least since 1914. Then 'Men of Britain' were reminded that seventy-eight women and children had been among the 137 fatalities when on that December morning the Imperial German Navy opened fire on Scarborough before moving on to bombard  other East Coast seaports, Hartlepool, West Hartlepool and Whitby.