The day began badly as I woke up at about 2am with a nagging pain in my back. I had had a bad attack of indigestion the previous week, repeated on the Sunday. Both had been accompanied by some back pain. But in the middle of the night, 22-23rd, there was no sign of indigestion, just growing back pain. Eventually I gave up on sleep and went downstairs.
Logging on to the computer for some distraction I was immediately struck by news of a suspected bomb attack in Manchester.
To be honest, I was, by then, in such pain that I gave little thought to yet another atrocity.
By 5am the pain was so intense (I was rolling on the floor groaning!) that I woke Deborah and she, very sensibly called an ambulance.
As a 56-year old bloke, it would have been somewhat disturbing if Ariana Grande had been anything more than a vague name in the back of my contemporary cultural awareness. I don't think I have ever heard one of her songs, but I am pretty certain that I would hate her brand of polished, poppy R&B.
But as Stuart Maconie points out so eloquently, that is what makes the Arena bombing so repellent. It deliberately targeted the kind of youthful, rainbow-coloured vibrancy that makes our city so great. The inclusion of nails and bolts was an intentionally callous act, designed to injure and maim as many young people and children as possible. The young were targeted in a vile manner, as though to rip their beautiful young faces.
Within minutes it was being assumed that the attack had been committed by a Muslim suicide bomber. This was soon confirmed and within hours we began to hear the voices of hate. The odious EDL (I won't dignify them with their full name) were soon on the streets.
However, it was not the dream of a multi-cultural Manchester which died yesterday. The first event which I was invited to attend yesterday was not the huge vigil in Albert Square, but rather a smaller, inter-faith, event organised by the British Muslim Heritage Centre. Friends across the faith spectrum are uniting to demonstrate that Manchester is a city of love, not hate. Muslim taxi drivers have given free rides to bewildered parents and young people. Christians have served free coffee and snacks to emergency service workers. The blood banks have been overwhelmed as people have travelled from as far afield as Blackpool to give their blood to whomever should need it, irrespective of the colour of the skin which will eventually receive it.
I love Manchester - and it will continue to be the vibrant rainbow city which has formed me. That dream has not been killed.
But as I was whisked to Tameside Hospital - yes, I did ask to go back to my old stomping ground - the ambulance was somewhat confused by the fact that Ashton Old Road was, at that moment, closed because of a fire. When we returned home, it became clear that the fire was in the old Halfway House pub.
I had long cherished a dream of renovating the Halfway House as a home for our church. We drew up plans and were only a couple of weeks from signing contracts at one point.
I don't know the truth of what happened. Rumours are flying around that it was an insurance job. Counter-rumours state that the owner did not have insurance. Whatever the truth of those rumours, the Halfway House pub is no more and my dreams of restoring the former glory of Openshaw are no more.
Does anyone want to buy the domain name halfwayopenshaw.org.uk?
Perhaps, though, this symbolic death is what God actually wants. The Halfway House was a great landmark building and I hoped to show God's love for this unloved community by restoring it to its neo-Gothic glory. A welcome to Openshaw and a welcoming place for those who live here. Memories - not all of them based in reality - are already being shared across the internet. But the Halfway House was a place with, at best, a very mixed blessing. I well remember a visit to one old lady who spoke nostalgically of the Halfway House as being the place where her husband used to drink - a place which provided her with a few hours of peace before he returned full of drink-fuelled violence.
Openshaw is no longer the industrial village it was built to be. Whilst there are still many indigenous working-class inhabitants, this is no longer the mono-coloured, mono-cultural community it was when we first came here 24 years ago. The 219 bus is known locally as the Africa Express as it is packed with folk from Nigeria, Ghana, DRC and other troubled parts of the world. Most of the Poles who came here in the early years of the century seem to have returned, but we still have numerous folk from Croatia, Serbia and other parts of Eastern Europe. Our Living Well drop-in is a genuine melting-pot, a meeting place where all come together. We have a mad trumpeter who walks up and down the road playing at passers by. As I type this, someone who looks remarkably like Michael Eavis has walked by, as has the turbaned Sikh who runs the shop next door. We even have a burgeoning GLBQT community if the evidence of my eyes as couples of all shapes and sizes walk down the street is to be believed.
To have restored the Halfway House would have been to look back to a nostalgia-fuelled 'golden age—' which I do not believe ever actually existed. Life in old-Openshaw was brutal and short. That was not what God wants.
So as I let go of the dream of rebuilding the past, we turn to exciting plans for what actually looks as though it may well become the Living Well Centre. A place of creativity, spirituality, healing and, above all welcome. Where all the many communities of Openshaw can come together and experience the love of Christ.
I do not belong to most of those communities. I am neither black nor gay. I am not Muslim. Nor am I working class.
Neither am I a teenaged girl fan of Ariana Grande. But I rejoice to belong to a city which embraces and celebrates all of these communities. An attack on any one of them is an attack on us all. But we will not allow the voices of hate to drown out our cries of unity. The City of Manchester stands United.
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