This week, because of where we live, I have felt afraid for the first time in many years...
We moved to this area, to grasp a little bit of 'the Good Life'. Our son would attend local schools and enjoy an active lifestyle, climbing trees and swinging from ropes suspended from them...
We live in the kind of spot that still exists in England where people don't bother to lock their doors, leave windows open to let in the summer evening's breeze and scent of the hills, and where you can trust your neighbours with your life.
Would it surprise you to know that several of my neighbours have helped me out over the years in a variety of challenging circumstances? One towed me and my son out of a storm swollen burn one harsh winter when my car couldn't handle the icy slope ahead of me. Another used his bright red tractor to tow me and my car out of a hummock dangerously close to a flooded quarry, where I'd skidded in horrendously icy weather... (This wasn't in the same week, by the way, I'm not that accident-prone... Well, maybe I am).
Rothbury folk are good folk. Salt of the earth. (Relatively) Law-abiding... (There might be the odd drunken fight, an illicit still or two, a car whose tax has been overlooked...) People here are open. Honest. Decent. Friendly. Helpful -- Welcoming, even though it's said around these parts that you must have two sets of grandparents buried in the village church-yard to be considered a local...
And this week a burly 'roid-enraged gunman called Raoul Moat, fleeing alleged crimes in Tyneside and County Durham, decided he would hide out here, taunting the Police in a bizarre cat and mouse game -- Playing a week-long spell of hide and go seek...
All this week, Police helicopters have flown over my house. Armed coppers from other Police Forces, perhaps more accustomed than we are to gun crime, patrolled the streets of the village.
On Wednesday night I stood rapt at my bedroom window while an armed raid on what turned out to be one of his campsites took over the evening airspace a couple of miles away at Wagtail Farm.
...All of my neighbours were extra vigilant throughout this time. Doors were locked. Rothbury itself was locked down. Under siege. Friends and family were carefully watched out for. On Friday night my husband sloped off to see his friend and locked me into the house for safety.
The rumour mill spoke of holiday cottages under siege and Police dogs unleashed, biting the innocent, while searches were underway. One home was broken into twice, on successive evenings. Moat helping himself first to food from the fridge, flickering a light off and on again to frighten away the family who fled to safety. The next day he came back after dark, cooked himself some food from the freezer and slept off his meal in one of the family's beds, leaving the imprint of his form on their pillows and sheets...
Last night, a young local confided to my husband that the Police had asked his landlady whether any fertilizer had been stolen in this, a further burglary. ...This is, as I said, a very rural area -- Remote farms, acres of moorland and steep crags, roaming sheep and cattle -- It would be difficult, even with top-notch military heat-seeking equipment, to sort out a crouched human form from the beasts...
Someone was looking to steal fertilizer, perhaps he mentioned it in his four-page rant about how the media was mis-representing him. Could he have had making explosives in mind?
At first, he didn't pose a threat to the general public. We were to go about our normal business. Shops re-opened but were very quiet. Schools opened under armed guard. Tourists stopped their remote walks, but lone anglers returned to the River Coquet. But now this man was posing a wider public threat, and we were all afraid...
This has been one of the biggest manhunts that the UK has ever seen.
And last night he died. I feel sorry that any life has been lost, and the investigation will perhaps uncover what actually happened when he took his own life.
However, I feel sorrier for his ex-girlfriend who was terrified of her life when she told him on his release from a short spell in prison (for assaulting his slightly built nine year old daughter), that she was now going out with a Policeman, to try to warn him off... Sam is still in hospital, severely harmed. She might never be able to have more children.
I feel even sorrier for the Policeman, going about his shift, sitting in his stationary car watching the busy traffic last Saturday, when Moat decided the whole Police Force were to blame for his troubles and discharged his weapon into the officer's kind face, leaving him horribly injured, perhaps blinded.
I feel even sorrier still for the martial arts champion instructor who was courting Moat's ex-girlfriend who was shot dead by him simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A man in his twenties, he'd only just moved up to the area from Manchester... Moat shot him three times, just to make sure he was dead.
There is too much pent-up anger in the world. There are too many people who hold on to grudges, who'd rather blame anyone but themselves for things that have gone wrong in their lives.
People will always fall foul of the system, or fall through society's wide-ish net.
Raoul Moat may have appeared to be a nice enough man to some people of his acquaintance. One of my colleagues bought a car from him last year... His mother should never have said, nor even thought, that he'd be better off dead.
Many of us have crosses to bear, but we're not all putting it out there, armed to the teeth, enraged and on a rampage.
He isn't a hero.
