Mancunians in all their singularity and swagger have already prevailed against terror – iNews

If terrorism is a crime against humanity, then it shouldnt matter where an atrocity takes place. We should feel as wounded if the atrocity takes place in Madras or Manila as if it happens in Manchester. And yet we know its not like that. Bomb attacks, random acts of mindful violence, have an acute sense of place.

We know those cafes in Paris. We see the news footage and imagine ourselves having a caf creme and a pastry there. We feel the pain, and it stays with us. The bus station in Baghdad, or the shopping centre in Nairobi are remote to us, in every sense of the word. We watch, momentarily stunned, and move on quite quickly. We cant help it: we understand that the right to live in peace is universal, but when a truly terrible action is visited on a place thats familiar to us, the anger that wells up, the despair that pervades, is something we just cant control.

On listening to accounts of that awful night at the Manchester Arena, I could picture the very streets those terrified people were running down, away from the scene of the carnage, I know the hotels in which they sought refuge, I could put faces to the Mancunian voices who talked about offering lifts home and rooms for the night. I imagined the CIS building, the citys first skyscraper and our proud symbol of the swinging Sixties, looking down impassively on the mayhem. That familiarity, together with the glottal-stop accents of the young people being interviewed, was heart-wrenching in the extreme.

The morning after the incident on Westminster Bridge in March, I wrote in this newspaper that the idea of Londoners standing shoulder to shoulder was a romantic fiction. The capital is an atomised, diverse, individualistic and materially imbalanced city, and the concept of a Londoner is a moot one anyway. Its a polyglot city like few others, and we all come to London for a mixture of reasons, but mainly in search of employment.

I have lived in London many more years than I lived in Manchester, but when someone asks where I come from, I always reply Manchester. And the city of my birth, also racially diverse and with its own share of urban blight, really does have a definable character, a personality, and a civic pride that is actually quite humbling.

There issuch a thing as a Mancunian, in all shades and colours and persuasions, and in the ensuing days, as the gruesome story of Monday night unfolds, well hear an awful lot more about how many saw this as an assault on their city, its values, its sense of fun, its amiability, its brotherhood. Thats why people didnt have to think twice about offering assistance: its what we do. And what many Mancunians will know now as Liverpudlians have discovered, repeatedly is that there is a flip side to that sense of belonging: there are occasions when it hurts, too.

Im not saying that Manchester is unique in these respects, but its history, from its importance as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution to its cultural significance in contemporary Britain, provides the city with a self-assurance, a swagger even, that gives it a certain singularity.

There is a lot of guff talked about individual places having a spirit, but thats indeed what Manchester has. You can see it on the streets of the city every Saturday night, when young people, dressed as if theyre in Ibiza, queue up in search of good times. You can take it from our lyrical expressions of the vagaries of life (and Heaven knows were all miserable now). You can experience it in ordinary, everyday connections with strangers, ready with a joke, and very hard to impress. And you can extract it from what the Bishop of Manchester said the morning after: The key to Manchesters success over centuries, he said, is that its a vibrant city where people have come to learn to trust each other and to live together.

That spirit has not been crushed by the events of Monday night. If anything, it is shown up in an even sharper relief against the barbarity of the offence. Manchester has been here before, of course. In June 1996, the biggest bomb in Britain since the end of the war was detonated by the IRA in the city centre, tearing apart the Arndale Shopping Centre, but miraculously not taking any lives. In the subsequent years, as Manchester rose from the wreckage and was transformed into the snazzy, modern centre it is today, Mancunians would joke that the IRA did us a favour in allowing us to rebuild the city.

There will be no jokes in years to come about what happened in the Manchester Arena this week. Children have not been allowed to grow up. Families are scarred for ever. The one solace relatively tiny though it is is that the wheels and motors that propel this great city, and the people who imbibe its spirit, will surely overcome.

Link:

Mancunians in all their singularity and swagger have already prevailed against terror - iNews