Responding to events!

I travelled home from Manchester yesterday evening, middle evening so that I was in time for the last bus from Oldham to Delph (see previous rants about our ridiculously bad bus service!). When I got home I checked my email and messages and Facebook. That is when I first heard that something had gone on in Manchester in between my leaving and my getting home.

By the time I went to bed they were still speculating about whether this was a bomb or a piece of equipment that had fatally malfunctioned.

Before my alarm rang this morning I was woken by a ping from my phone, a message from my daughter (she is on holiday in Spain where the time was not quite so early), expressing her disbelief that a bomb had gone off at the MEN Arena in Manchester.

And so another crazy person chose to target a concert, this time largely attended by children and young teens. The audience would have been largely made up of family groups. Imagine leaving the concert in that bubble of happiness you have from a couple of hours spent singing along to music you enjoy. You still have that warm feeling from being with a crowd who all publicly enjoy the same stuff as you do. And then all hell breaks loose.

Political party leaders have agreed to suspend campaigning until, the cynical bit of me remarks, they decide how best to exploit it to their advantage. Will we see a compassion competition? President Trump has already dubbed the perpetrators "evil losers", in yet another display of his command of grown up language. We can only hope that his fight against terrorism does not lead to an outburst of direct action.

I have been impressed by the number of my younger Facebook friends, ex-students, who immediately offered accommodation and other kinds of help to concert-goers perhaps stranded in Manchester. I have read that taxi drivers were taking people home free of charge.

There is another side to the social media thing. Messages have been flying around email and Facebook and presumably all the other social media as friends check up that they are all safe and sound. This is all as it should be. We had an email from a friend in Paris, not so much checking up as sending a message of solidarity. City to city.

But I find myself having mixed feelings about all this.

Just in case you have nobody who cares enough to check with you personally, Facebook invites us to "mark ourselves as safe". And loads of people who you never would have thought might in the most amazing of circumstances have been attending an Ariana Grande concert have been doing just that.

And so we can all feel involved.

And here I am, doing exactly the same thing by blogging about it!