Thursday, May 25

Amid all the devastation of the appalling bombing in Manchester, it's good to see that some reporters winkle out the stories of courage and defiance, and the triumph of the human spirit.

After the blast, everyone would have panicked and rushed to the exits, trampling others in the rush. That instinct of self-preservation is human nature. But, after that first response, it is heartening to hear that many people turned back to help others; that's human nature, too. Two homeless men, hanging around outside, became 'heroes' for giving a hand.

People will talk about the 'spirit of the blitz' but that's just a convenient handle to hang this very human situation on. We see it every day, around the world, in responses to natural disasters and missile attacks and so on. The Poms seem particularly good at it but it's not exclusive to Anglo-Saxons or Celts.

One special moment for me, in the hours following the explosion, was the response of Manchester poet, Tony Walsh. Poetry has the capacity to strike to the heart of the matter and Tony's poem certainly does that.

“There’s hard times again in these streets of our city, but we won’t take defeat and we don’t want your pity, because this is the place where we stand strong together with a smile on our face, Mancunians forever,”

The words, Cometh the hour, Cometh the man, sprang to mind and I rushed to Google to find the source, expecting a Roman poet or an Elizabethan dramatist. Not so, it was first uttered by an English cricket captain, Cliff Gladwin, in December 1948 when he scored the winning run against South Africa. I wonder if he came from Manchester.