Yesterday my dad was 86 years old. Today at least 22 families will wake up to a world in which their own children will have found their life ended young. The loss can only be indescribable. Life will never be the same again; the sense of injustice will not be comprehended.

The cowardice of the perpetrator is striking. Isn’t it brave and principled to target unwitting children and young people?

The emergency services, along with ordinary people who responded heroically, represent the best of a society that refuses to regard such events as ‘normal’. It is shocking, a crime and a sin beyond words.

The words that haunt me come from a poem written three thousand years ago:

How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? (Psalm 13:2)

The depths of human perversion are evident. My prayer is that those…