Hang on a minute, though..... what now?

So, the runaways have been found, I see.  Twitter is chirping positively nineteen to the dozen with tweets of joy expressing how relieved all her family and friends are at the prospect of having young Megan Stammers back home again.  Don't get me wrong, I'm glad she's apparently safe and well and hasn't suffered the same fate as countless other teenage runaways: in that respect at least she's been lucky.

The reports however are that the pair were spotted strolling hand-in-hand like any young lovers down a main shopping street in the middle of Bordeaux in broad daylight and the police were tipped off.  Megan was said to be "in floods of tears" when the police separated them.  Which suggests to me that she may perhaps not in fact have actually wanted to come back and be reunited joyfully with her family - or at least not just yet.  Either way, the scenario certainly doesn't bear the hallmark of a kidnap victim, and whatever the legal nicities of it, an "abduction" is not the word I'd use to use to describe it.

Jeremy Forrest the maths teacher is under arrest and if I were he, I'd get myself a good lawyer sharpish: he's going to need one.  His job and marriage I imagine are down the tube, and despite the UK judiciary's propensity for pretty perverse sentencing, he's got to be looking at jail time as being on the cards.

And what's Megan going to make of that, I wonder?  She's had an awful lot of her private life dissected in public this week (if anything on Twitter or Facebook can legitimately be described as "private", that is).  Will she blame her parents and/or the police for the abrupt end to her little escapade and the loss of the guy she loved (or thought she did)?  How will she look back on it in years to come?  What will she make of all the things that have been written about her?  Will she one day end up on the Jeremy Kyle show *shudders*?

We shall probably never know.  Out of the harsh glare of media publicity, some semblance of a normal schoolgirl's life should start to return.  But I doubt somehow that either of them are ever going to be able to just carry on as if none of it had ever happened.