Yesterday morning I woke at stupid o’clock and, after half an hour lying in the dark, decided that I’d head to the spare room with a book to avoid disturbing the slumbering Mrs K. I picked up my phone, the screen activated and there was the BBC alert “19 dead in Manchester bombing.” [the death toll has since risen].

I’m sure my reaction was the same as almost everybody else’s. “Killing kids at a pop concert? What kind of world do we live in?” I lay awake until everybody else rose, and made sure I gave each of my kids a big hug; grateful for what I still had, sorry for those who had lost loved ones overnight or were still waiting for news.

It must be my entry into middle-age, but I’ve recently grown nostalgic for the 1990s – when the Berlin Wall had fallen, Apartheid had gone, a peace process in my native Northern Ireland and peace talks in the Middle East, BritPop blasting from the hi-fi, Trainspotting, Jamon Jamon, and Pulp Fiction at the movies, plenty of disposable income in my wallet. What happened to those good ol’ days?

But, I keep having to remind myself that this is utter nonsense. The 90s were the decade of the Balkan conflict with its massacres and ethnic cleansing, and the Rwandan/Burundi genocide. The fact of the matter is that we are now living in some of the best times in history. Global violence is at an historical low. Poverty, whether measured in absolute numbers or a share of the world population, is plummeting. Our attempts at tackling climate change, while not yet sufficient, are accelerating at a rate that no-one predicted.

ISIS has certainly put the terror into terrorism. They deliberately tap into our deepest fears – targeting kids, attacking crowds in the streets with lorries, revelling in cruelty – they truly are the stuff of nightmares. That fear can make us freeze, give up, look inwards, distrust others. It makes us feel the world is getting worse when it is demonstrably getting better.

There were at least two, probably three, orders of magnitude more heroes than villains on the streets on Manchester on Monday night. Let’s be inspired by them.