My Manchester.  My city.  My city full of wonderful eccentrics, of history, of innovation, of tolerance.  A place where you can meet somebody in a pub and be best friends by the end of the night.  Where colour or creed matter not one iota, not red not blue.  Just Mancunian.

It’s so hard not to cry.  Many have. To know that music, one of our heartbeats, has been used to create such pain and sorrow.  It’s easy to scream and shout, to blame and rant but if ever there was a time we shouldn’t it’s now.  We’re better than that.  We’re the taxi queue in Piccadilly Gardens.  We’re the fruit seller outside Kendals. We’re the last bus home with the drunks.  We’re the pigeons on Market Street at 8 o’clock on a Sunday morning feasting on the late night kebab and chips.  We’re the curry houses of Rusholme and the cafes of the Northern Quarter.  We’re Canal Street and Deansgate Locks.  We’re the fountain that never works and if it does somebody puts bubble bath in. We’re music in every shape and form in every venue.  We’re the literature and history and invention that this city gives.  Bringer of the modern age, the computer, the atom.  It’s all here.  It’s all us.

So.  What give one tiny insignificant footnote in history the right to terrorise us?  To try and bring us to our knees?  Nothing.  When they are long gone our history will still be there.  Our music.  Our city. Our love.

WE are a city of individuals and a city of one.

WE are the voice of the many and a single cry.

WE are the workers bees that create the Manchester Buzz.

WE are the silence of reverence and the roar of the crowd.

WE are everyone and if anyone thinks they can even try to change that then they really haven’t got a clue.

WE are Manchester.  Hear us roar.