It’s really easy, at times like this, to feel sorry for ourselves. Norway has just experienced the greatest tragedy in our nation’s history, since WW2, and everything’s slowly going back to normal now. Today on Twitter, all the tweets from Norwegians were no longer about Breivik or Utøya or the bomb. People are going back to tweeting about music or movies or food. Facebook is returning to the mundane, and the views on my blog have diminished. I never thought I’d be happy about that, but it means we’re slowly returning to some kind of normalcy.

And this is when I look up and realise that while the Earth has stood still here in Oslo, everywhere else it’s kept on turning. This weekend there was a terrible train wreck in China. According to the New York Times, 43 people were killed and 210 were injured. This too is a great tragedy.

In Ghana they’re cracking down on gays, with Paul Evans Aidoo, the Western Region Minister, ordering the arrests of all openly gay people, and encouraging landlords and tenants to inform on people they suspect of being gay.

Yesterday, Serbian protesters attacked and set fire to a security post on the border between Serbia and Kosovo, and Syrian forces killed at least 8 people in a raid on the town of Kanaker.

And, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, Amy Winehouse is dead.

All around the world people are suffering and dying, there’s violence and conflict and disaster and death all round. We’re not the only ones who have experienced a tragedy in the past week. I guess my point is that with distance comes perspective. This hit us. This was close to home. I think I’ll be viewing the news a little differently from now on. Be less quick to change the channel and dismiss bad things as happening far away, because as we now know, they could be happening here.