However, the source of our collective distress is not only the horrific sights and sounds of violence and terror, but deep down, through such dreadful disasters we also struggle with our common conceptions of a loving God.
Daynes added: "This report confirms that we can no longer turn a blind eye to the dreadful humanitarian disaster on our doorstep".
In the US (a British release seems remote), the reviews have been dreadful: "A disaster," said the Village Voice; "repellent" opined the New York Times.
"It seemed so emblematic of the Czechoslovakia of the interwar period — a place of progressive ideas, of culture, of light and openness — and the dreadful double disaster of Nazism followed by Soviet Communism," he said.
Perhaps most notoriously – a state of affairs which takes some doing, given he once capped someone while at work – Cole suffered a dreadful PR disaster when he got round to explaining the thought process behind his defection from Arsenal to London rivals Chelsea in the summer of 2006.
(The hazards were remembered in Aberdeen in July when they marked the 25th anniversary of the dreadful Piper Alpha disaster in which 167 offshore workers died).
A year ago this Sunday, a dreadful and terrifying natural disaster was sweeping a trail of death and destruction along the north-eastern coast of Japan.
This was a tempestuous tour for the England team but only because of external events – two dreadful assassinations and the Bhopal disaster.
Despite the fresh round of warnings this week about the possibility of another attack, many Americans perhaps most still seem to treat the attacks as if they were a single, dreadful event, like a natural disaster, or a random crime committed against America, with the Bush administration meting out punishment, most of it abroad.Yet the destruction of the World Trade Centre was not a one-off event.
Like Flashman, he is boastful, crooked, an intercontinental Lothario, a bungling harebrain borne along by disasters, and a dreadful liar.
