Adrian Kibbler hopes the Paris attacks will not mean people stay away from our major centres

Hopefully people will do as much Christmas shopping as they can in our market towns and villages because they want to support the local economy and for the convenience, time and money this will save compared with travelling to bigger urban centres like Birmingham.

But I hope they do not stay away from places like Birmingham because of fear following the terrible events in Paris and elsewhere.

Some concern is understandable and taking extra vigilance is sensible but if we stop living our normal lives and allow these terrible events to create divisions between different religious communities then the terrorists will have won.

Time will tell if the fine rhetoric from David Cameron and other world leaders converts itself into concrete support for our French friends who currently find themselves in the front line of a ‘war’ that affects all of us.

Earlier this summer we commemorated the end of the Second World War – a conflict in which civilians in our cities and other places found themselves subject to bombing.

Furthermore, we do not have to be old to remember the IRA campaign so have we not been here before?

In some ways I think that what we have seen in Paris is different.

Living under bombing in the second world war must have been terrible and no one needs to tell me about the IRA atrocities.

It was as a young and very green trainee reporter just weeks into the job that I found myself helping senior colleagues cover the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings that killed 21 people in my own city.

The IRA did some terrible things and I am no apologist for what happened but there was a difference. The IRA attacks against what they did not regard as ‘military’ targets usually had a warning. This is no defence and in many cases like the pub bombings the warnings were inadequate.

But what we saw on that Friday evening in Paris was different. It was the indiscriminate targeting of civilians with the objective of causing as much carnage and terror as possible. It was carried out by those who not only accept death as ‘an occupational hazard’ but who actually seek what they see as martyrdom.

Our security and intelligence forces do a superb and often dangerous job operating in silence and the shadows so we do not hear of their success but we cannot expect them to be 100 per cent successful.

For many reasons, including our absence of land borders, France is more vulnerable than the UK but it is hard to believe that sooner or later there will not be a terrorist attack in this country.

It will most likely come in one of our great cities at a time and place planned to cause most death and destruction. So as people shop in our market towns perhaps they will spare a thought for those in other places in the UK and overseas where going to the shops, a concert or a football match demands a level of courage and defiance.

In June 1963 US President John Kennedy went to Berlin at the height of the Cold War and famously declared 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'

More than half a century we are all Parisians.