A Yorkshire lad and a suicide bomber. Photograph: PA
Journalists are a pretty cyncial bunch. Thick-skinned. Reckon they've seen it all. But the phenomenon of the British suicide bombers - their background, their stories - it silences the imagination.
As someone in the newsroom said this morning, you end up seeing so much in this job, you don't expect ever again to hear about something and say 'I don't believe it.' Nor do you expect to have to rely so much on cliche - 'defies comprehension', 'beggars belief'. It feels as if we have squandered our superlatives and adjectives on trivia. How many ordinary things have we said were 'incredible'? That last minute goal, in some long since forgotten football match, was it really so 'unbelievable'?
And then you try to contemplate why Hasib Hussain or Mohammad Sidique Khan or Shehzad Tanweer did what they did, what might have been going through their minds, and there are no words left.
That is perhaps one reason why at midday we remember the victims in silence.
