Vale

Last night the sky thundered and cracked as lightening bolts rained down and rain wet the streets.
It was still hot and like many people I hardly slept.

At around the same time in Paris, in a newsroom, 12 journalists were gunned down and 11 more people injured.
It makes my blood run cold just thinking about it.

Beautiful Paris.

In another life, I was a journalist. I spent 20 years in a newsroom and they are the same everywhere, regardless of country or language.

They are filled with people who love words, who are passionate about finding the truth and who are often the targets of abuse and criticism because people - particularly those with something to hide - don't like a light shone on their actions.

They are places where people laugh and mourn at the stories they are compiling, tell bad and naughty jokes and make puns from words.

A place where people think long and hard about what they are writing and the consequences of what will be published.

I think of those people working in that newsroom in that beautiful city of Paris and it sickens me that they were targeted by three extremists with guns.

Are journalists now the new targets in this bloody war of terror?

Words are powerful. They can heal - look at the words of Walter Mikac after his wife and children were killed at Port Arthur, the words around the unexpected death of cricketer Phil Hughes - and they can inspire.

An example - Martin Luther King, also gunned down by a madman.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

In the beautiful city of Paris, the city of lights, the light has dimmed.

But the darkness will not prevail.