Observer reporter's reflections on Cumbria killings

As district chief reporter for the Whitehaven News at that time, he grew to know and love Lakeland's coastal fringe, and the hardy but kind-hearted breed of people - many of them farmers, ex-miners, mariners cand nuclear workers - who inhabit it.

Here he gives some personal thoughts about the killings and how news of them unfolded:

WHEN I switched on the radio as I prepared to drive home on Wednesday, I could hardly believe what I was hearing. A dozen people shot dead in West Cumbria, and at least twice that number wounded.

Then the voice of Dr Barrie Walker, a GP in Seascale, clearly struggling to keep his emotions in check as he described the carnage he and colleagues had been brought face-to-face with earlier that day.

Dammit! I knew the man. Seascale used to be on my patch. I covered its parish council meetings, its annual flower show, and indeed the retirement of one of Barrie's former colleagues from the local surgery.

As various news presenters described what had happened and where, I found myself there with them, visualising in detail many of the locations mentioned.

Duke Street, Whitehaven, where Derrick Bird had gunned down a fellow cabbie -- I had my leaving-do in a pub just yards from the taxi rank; Egremont - home of an annual crab fair and also of my late great-uncle and aunt; Gosforth -- a regular port-of-call on my news-gathering rounds; Boot - in beautiful Eskdale, where I'd sometimes swap my car for a ride on its narrow gauge railway, the La'al Ratty.

And among those killed a name I recognised - Kevin Commons, a solicitor whom I occasionally encountered when reporting cases at Whitehaven magistrates' court and who lived at Mawbray Farm, Frizington, the village where I first lived after joining the Whitehaven News.

Kevin was just 60 when he died on the driveway to his home, and a heartfelt tribute from a fellow lawyer, Markus Nickson, conjured up another face I knew well.

Though more than 300 miles away, it seemed the killings were suddenly just too close to home, and I genuinely grieved for all the "marras" (mates) whose lives would forever be blighted by Bird's murderous spree.

Professionally, I could applaud the efforts of my own ex-colleagues in producing a special edition of the Whitehaven News within hours of the killings to reflect the horrors wreaked on their community.

But I also knew that many of them would be personally affected by what had happened, and I am both sad and angry that, like Hungerford and Dunblane, before it, lovely Georgian Whitehaven will now inevitably be remembered as that place where a man took 12 innocent lives and tore the hearts out of so many more.