17th May:

There is something strange about human nature that seems to make people clamour to associate themselves with the victims of terrible crimes.

The father of missing child Madeleine McCann is Scottish but the McCann family live in Leicestershire, England. However, this has not stopped sections of the Scottish media from adopting the poor little girl as one of their own and reporting every move in the police investigation to find her as if the story was particularly local in nature. I'm not suggesting that the Scottish public should have no interest at all in these events, and every person of decency naturally hopes that the child is found alive and well, but there is something a little cloying in the reporting and the seeming attempts to take ownership of the story. It feels like....artificial tartan-isation, for want of a better expression. It's also arguably very lazy journalism.

Conservative MP Boris Johnson was forced to apologise to the people of Liverpool a few years ago when he accused them of overreacting to the death of local aid-worker Ken Bigley in Iraq. I'm not saying Boris was right, but I do remember being surprised myself at the time - all that public grief being displayed by people who didn't even know the man, on the basis of some vague sense that he was part of the community. One of them, whether he actually wanted to be or otherwise.

When a serial rapist is caught in a provincial town, the local community usually breathes a sign of relief rather than feeling some shared sense of responsibility for his actions. The moral? We associate with people selectively, and sometimes our associations tell you more about us than them.