Ian Rankin’s diary: Paris, ignoring Twitter and understanding evil

After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering emails. Quotidian stuff. An early dinner with one of my sons, and I was in bed at a decent hour. Checking Twitter, I began to realise that a grim spectacle was unfolding in Paris. Soon enough, on-the-ground reportage was joined by rumour, inaccuracy and blatant misinformation. That’s the problem with ‘rolling news’ — and Twitter has become part of that industry. On the TV, the reports were more measured but far less immediate, with repetitious footage of police cars and emergency workers. Twitter was the more immersive and pulsating place to be, but I soon grew fatigued by this very fact, and by the deluge of opinions. Radio news at the midnight chimes, and then sleep.

By next morning, flowers were being left outside the French consulate in Edinburgh. I was reminded of the Charlie Hebdo killings just ten months before. Flowers were left then, too, and the queue to sign the book of remembrance stretched along the chill damp pavement. Many of us gathered a few days later for a vigil in the gardens facing the consulate. There were sombre speeches, then silence and the holding aloft of pens. Later some of us attached those pens to the gloss-black metal railings outside the consulate. We were marking our sense of kinship. What more could we do?

On Remembrance Sunday I had been in London, with a mostly free day. I’d happened to be passing St James’s Palace at eleven, so paused to pay my respects while watching a group of busby’d soldiers as they stood to silent attention in the small parade ground to the side of the palace. I thought of my father, who served in the second world war.