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mark the third time in six months I've been stunned by news from the county I grew up in and worked in for many years.

To give you an idea of what it's usually like working as a journalist in Cumbria, in my first five years on Carlisle's local newspaper there wasn't a single murder to report.

It wasn't that there weren't important and serious stories to focus on but nothing on the scale of the last six months.

First came the Cockermouth floods, devastating the town I went to school in, then last week's bus crash, involving the school my daughter goes to (though not her bus) and now these terrifying shootings.

I spent five happy years reporting for the in Whitehaven. The local radio offices were just yards from Duke Street, where today's mayhem started.

I also know Egremont and the villages of Seascale and Gosforth well.

Today I'm in Westminster, somewhere about as far removed from West Cumbria geographically and philosophically as you can be.

So to hear tales of blood and murder on those streets I remember so well is not only astonishing and an unreal feeling, but also chilling.

These are close-knit communities. Bonds born of isolation are strong, and it's likely most people will know someone caught up in today's events.

Witness the amount we already know about the gunman .

That shows how strong the connections between people are in West Cumbria. There's no shortage of people who knew him, something you couldn't imagine in a big city.

I remember the towns and villages which have made the news today with fondness because of their sense of community and the friendly and unpretentious characters that inhabited them.

Sympathies have to be focused on the families who are now mourning their losses or tending the injured.

But today as I can witness from the garish headlines on the it seems a whole community has become known nationally not for its closeness but for a few hours of madness.

will be picked over for some time to come, but how Cumbrians must hanker now for a long period of peaceful calm free of media attention.

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