I Love Manchester

22nd May 2017: At approximately 22:30 an explosion hits the Manchester Arena, a large concert venue. The timing of the bomb was designed to hit the mainly young, mainly female audience as they left the performance of the artist Ariana Grande.

The terrorist responsible committed suicide, blowing himself up, as the audience was leaving and heading in his direction. His intent was purely to inflict the maximum number of casualties in the most innocent and unsuspecting of victims you can imagine. Young girls. The youngest fatality that has been announced at time of writing was just eight-years old. How monstrous the act was is unspeakable and, of course, entirely the purpose of the terrorist.

I'm no expert in terrorism. I know as much as anyone else who pays attention to the news.

I'm no expert in ISIS, the motivation and radicalisation that drives these young men to extreme measures for their religious fundamentalist cause.

The only reason I write about this here, now, is because this attack took place in Manchester. That's the city I call home. I live in a town within Manchester. I work at a place perhaps less than 100 metres from the Arena where the terrorist attack took place. I grew up here. This one felt close.

I was at the Arena in Janary, watching a Marvel Superhero show. I took my wife and young son. It wasn't the first time I had been there. I've been to the Arena stacks of times. There's something chilling about the discovery of an attack in a place that you have frequented. That little notion of concern that informs you: it could have just as easily been me.

I didn't know if I was going to be allowed to get into work the morning after the attack. The option to work from home was available to me, but once I realised I could get to work - that there was enough of a functioning train and tram network accessible to me - I knew I had to go. It sounds stupid. I'm just one guy. Me showing up or not showing up, what difference did that make? But there was a part of me that wanted to get out there into the commute, out onto the streets of this city I have walked in all my life, just as a kind of private statement that I was not going to be cowed into sheltering at home.

Bizarrely this wasn't even the first City centre terrorist bomb attack that has occurred in my lifetime. The last time Manchester was attacked in this manner was in 1996, by the IRA. I was much younger then, but I still had a job in the city centre - a part-time job in a shoe shop. The 1996 attack happened on a Saturday. The 'decent' thing about the IRA was that they, at least, warned in advance of their intentions. I received a phone call before I was due to start work that day stating that there had been a bomb threat warning and that I had to wait for further instructions.

At some point later the bomb went off.

I received a phone call from my supervisor a little later telling me I didn't need to bother coming into work; the bomb had gone off! But a few days later I got to go and see the devastation that had been wreaked for myself. It beggared belief. The scale of the destruction.

But, like I said, at least the IRA didn't have the intention of taking as many lives as possible. Not like the events at the Manchester Arena. This is a different enemy, with a different motivation.

After the IRA bomb Manchester rebuilt itself. The city has never looked better. From the rubble came opportunity to rebuild with improvement, and so we received (eventually!) a more modern, aesthetically-pleasing city centre that flourished. And today, following the tragedy, I felt somewhat in tune with the city and the people; we would not be cowed.

The thing I can't really get my head around is how this plays out to the rest of the world. I recall the Paris attacks and understanding how big a deal it was, because I could see how much of an impact the atrocities there were rolling out across the news here and elsewhere. But seeing my hometown city on the news just felt strange. I got off the tram on my way to work and looked at the police tape cordoning off the area around the Arena and wondered, Is this the same level of big deal as the Paris attack was?

It may sound dumb, but it just feels different when you're in it. It doesn't feel as big. Like, during the day, I was in work and the news came out that something had happened in the shopping centre close to where I worked and the place had been evacuated. There were rumours of gunshots. Rumours of arrests. And meanwhile I was in work, able to look out of the window at where reporters were setting up, straightening their ties before delivering their piece to camera, and it felt curiously understated.

Weird.

My six-year-old son is aware enough of the world to hear about the events that had happened today, and something this close to home was bound to catch his attention. How do you explain such a thing? I told it to him as simply as I could. The terrorist, he was just one bad man. And what was important to notice was how everyone rallied together to help after what had happened. Because the good people outweigh the bad. That's the truth this City holds to, and it's the only truth that stands in the face of terrorism and says: You will not win.

I'm proud of how my City has responded after this attack. I loved Manchester yesterday. Today I love it just a little bit more.

Chest Pain Worry

Today at work I had a couple of minutes where I genuinely believed I may faint or suffer some form of heart attack at my desk. It was amazingly surreal and terrifying all at once.

Over the past couple of days I've had a pain in my chest. It didn't seem like much. I self-diagnosed it as some kind of muscular pain rather than a specific heart condition. I mean, I'm a fairly fit and healthy man. I'm on the verge of 39-years-old but I can run 5-6 km in less than 30 minutes. I'm not obese. I have never smoked. And sure, I drink, more than I should, and probably I don't eat anywhere near as well as I ought to, but still - no one's perfect.

I've never, aside from one blip when I was a child that turned out to be nothing, spent a single night in hospital.

So I've got a pain in my chest that feels sharper when I breathe in, filling my lungs, and I figure that surely this is some form of muscular pain and it'll go away in a few days and that will be the end of it. I'm too fit and healthy for it to possibly be anything else, and that was the end of it.

Only that's not the end of it. And in the back of my mind, at the start of the week, there's this gnawing concern - only quiet, only subtle - saying that this doesn't feel quite right.

Yesterday, walking to the train station after work, and I arrive there sweating, slightly nauseous. I figure it's been a warm day but, because of the rain, I've had to wear a coat and so that has caused me to get hotter than comfortable. Never-the-less, when I get home my shirt and undershirt are more than just damp, they're wet and heavy.

I thought nothing of it. Later in the evening I had a quick blast on the exercise bike in the house. 10 minute burst, Did over 4k. I was sweating again, breathing hard, and there was no pain in my chest. Like you'd expect pain in your heart if you exercised hard if you were on the verge of a heart attack, right? I know I went on the bike for that quick blast like I was conducting a little test. I felt like I had passed it.

I was OK, I told myself. It's no biggie.

3 o clock in the morning I wake up in bed. My chest hurts. My sleepy brain cuts through the mild alarm to figure it's just something about the way I've been lying, my posture exacerbating the muscular problem I have diagnosed myself with. Only whilst I'm lying there, in my bed, my left arm is tingling.

If you've ever found yourself lying awake at 4 in the morning with worry you'll know that this is the time of day when your rational, comforting sense gives way to fears and concerns that flourish. I am lying in bed, next to my sleeping wife, genuinely worried I'm enduring some prologue to a heart attack. Thoughts about leaving my wife and my son behind, after my death, they play out.

4 o clock in the morning is an absolutely mental time of day to warp your worries into horrors.

I somehow pacify myself that I am being crazy. I know that being awake in the early hours of the morning forges these scary notions and I was resolutely not going to give in to them. I slept again. Woke up. Got ready. Went to work. And that brings us pretty much with me at my desk.

That mild pain in my chest and the slight dullness in my arm, it's still there. It's around 11 o clock in the morning, just before lunch, and sitting at my desk I casually look at Google on my phone and type in 'chest pain left arm numb'.

What I read scared the shit out of me. So many of the symptoms - like the nausea, sweating, the tingling and prickling sensations, the swelling pain across the front of the chest - all of that gets called out as seriously symptomatic of something. Words like 'pulmonary embolism' and 'aortic dissection' or just good old 'angina' jump out. The message is clear; don't wait, get to a doctor and get it checked. It might be nothing. It could be something.

And sitting at my desk my whole body just starts tingling, going numb. I'm not exaggerating anything. Honestly, it's not like me to give in to this. I've always considered myself stronger than that. Better. My wife, she's the hypochondriac, the stresshead. She's in and out of the hospital with all kinds of things. But not me. I'm the healthy one. But there I am going numb in my arms and legs, and my head is getting light. 

Oh shit, I am thinking. I'm starting to panic that I am right there going to faint, for sure. I've never fainted. And right in that moment I believe it's absolutely going to happen. I'm surrendered to the certainty. I feel like I must have turned a whiter shade of pale, should anyone have cared to look at me and notice how stricken I had suddenly become.

Of course I didn't say anything to anyone. Bizarrely I was also worried about the sheer embarrassment and fuss that would be generated from collapsing at my desk. I couldn't bear the thought of it. I took deep breaths, tried to compose myself, and then after a minute I went to the bathroom and took off my shirt and splashed cold water on my face and paced and told myself over and over, Get a grip, you're not having a heart attack.

I calmed down. I was got annoyed with myself for being so weak.

Now here I am typing this. I made it home from work. The chest pain is still there, slightly more eased I think, and I am still telling myself that it's muscular. Has to be. And yet this also makes me think that if it's really just that then there, at my desk today, I suffered a panic attack. Me? Panic attacks? Come on!

But if it wasn't a panic attack then it was a real, mild warning signal of some issue with my heart that I can only hope to God isn't really there.

My plan is to see how it is tomorrow. If it feels like it's getting better, easing further, then great. I'll carry on keeping up with the exercise. Monitor myself, my feelings, and hey maybe I'll take a pass on drinking quite as much as I generally do.

And if this is the last entry of this blog, well, you can rest assured that that was absolutely a shitty idea and things did not go well and, really, the only advice I'd have to offer is: you ever find yourself feeling anything like I have described about today then don't be a fucking idiot like me; go and get yourself checked out.

Resident Evil 4 - An Appreciation

In this post I am going to be bestowing praise on a revisit of the classic game Resident Evil 4. I have recently been playing this again on PS4, thanks to the remastered version of it that has been released, and it has reminded me of all that I remembered was fantastic, and the sheer wealth of all that I had forgotten that was amazing about it.

My first experience of playing the game was actually on Wii, which was by no means the first platform the game had appeared on. Indeed, when I cautiously bought the game for the Wii I was aware that it was an old title and it made me wonder if I was investing my money in an absolute duffer. However, as the Wii was my only main console I was somewhat starved of serious, hardcore games.

I hadn't yet purchased a PS3 at the time (though I knew a friend who had) and I was deeply envious of Dead Space that he had recently shown me at his house. Little did I realise that by buying Resident Evil 4 I was buying the game that had completely influenced Dead Space and was, in many ways, far superior.

But, at first, knowing nothing about the game, I loaded Resident Evil 4 and gripped onto my Wiimote and Control Stick, and waited to see if this game was going to be as big a pile of shit as I feared.

I was impressed from the start, with the opening movie giving proceedings a feel of a cinematic adventure (pure b-movie standard, naturally, but the game practically revels in its ridiculousness). And not before too long the game delivers its first masterstroke: after a minor skirmish with a few hostile natives to warm you up and get you into the controls, you casually walk into the local village and from there the game locks you in to a battle with hordes of baddies appearing from all angles, chasing you wherever you may run.

Think you can escape by running into a house and pushing cupboards up against the doors and windows? Think again. A roaring whirr of a chainsaw introduces the first terrifying and memorable villain; the chainsaw ganado.

This opening battle is superb, You hide in a house you trigger the chainsaw baddie. You try and climb the bell tower and the villagers light a fire and smoke you out. Your best bet, though not clear at the time, is to save your ammo and your life by just running and running around until the bell rings and the villagers disappear. But the sheer variety of all that can happen, of the different strategies you can undertake to try and survive, are an expert introduction to the game.

From this point on it's like the game is an embarrassment of killer moments. Re-playing it again I would manage to get out of one area into the next only to be immediately reminded of what stressful but tremendous bit awaited me.

Go to the lake and battle against the giant creature under the water in your boat. Survive the church and rescue the girl to find yourself trapped in a cabin and having to defend downstairs and upstairs as the many entry points are breached. From there you're in an arena locked in combat with a huge troll.

And the game isn't easy! The controls make life difficult; you can't aim and shoot and move at the same time. On harder difficulties especially you need to try and get headshots and then step in for physical attacks to conserve ammo. Onward you'll go to battle into the castle and face hordes of enemies brandishing scythes and shields and bloody sniper crossbows. . .

The memorable moments just keep coming, Who can forget the first time they took a step down into the prison and had to face the blind enemy with huge claws. His only weakspot was on his back. So you had to quietly step away from him, shoot a bell to attract his attention and then blast him in the back. 

My wife played the game on my recommendation. I distinctly remember making myself a drink in the kitchen when she was playing this section of the game on her own, chattering to herself "I don't like this, I don't like this" whilst she tried to keep her nerve and get through it.

The sheer embarrassment of riches continues. There's the castle garden maze. . .

. . . filled with savage dogs, constantly growling unseen behind the hedges, waiting to jump out at you. And then there's a foray down into the sewers where you face off against giant bugs that are near-invisible. Move softly, and keep your eyes peeled, and you might just make out the steam of their breath and be able to sniper shot them before you walk into their trap. Later you'll fight more bugs, flying bugs.

These buzz horribly as they get closer and you frantically scan above and around you, trying to work out where they are coming from before it's too late. And there always just seems to be slightly more of them than you think is fair. Pumping shotgun bullets away, round after round, and as you survive you're already worried that you've wasted too many bullets and left yourself underprepared for whatever is coming next.

And let's forget there is that bit of the game where you have to control Ashley, the damsel in distress, during which sequences you don't have a weapon of any kind at all.

Those moments are somewhat stressful. Though perhaps not quite as stressful as having to deal with the Regenerator baddies (in which you need to use a heat-scope on your sniper rifle to pick out the weak spots as it shuffles towards you, making the most hideous slurping-hiss murmur).

Or how about that bit where, out of fucking nowhere, you end up locked in a suspended cage with an overpowered beast scuttling after you whilst you try and find and hit the right buttons to open the door that you then have to get through before the timer runs out all whilst being ambushed at random intervals.

In my replay of it I have found it just as stressful, if not more so. First time around there was the thrill of discovery and excitement about what lay around the corner. Playing it when you know what's coming (though, crucially, can't quite remember it well enough to recall the best strategy for survival) has instilled just a constant sense of dread. It's like an ordeal. But a fun, rewarding ordeal.

Like taking a high-powered magnum, saving all my bullets because I know what's coming, and absolutely annihilating this annoying little shit in a few well-placed shots to his giant monstrous eyeball.

Top tip: When it comes to fighting Krauser, keep your gun holstered and use your knife.

Just. . . trust me. I remembered learning this all those years ago when I played on Wii. I remembered it again for PS4. It turns an overwhelming boss encounter into a situation where you turn the tables and get your own back without wasting a single bullet of precious ammo.

Resident Evil 4 is a classic. No question. It packs more ideas and set piece moments into its 10-15 hour game time (if you're slow and methodical like me, that'll be even longer for one go through) than pretty much any other game I can think of. Many other games may pitch an entire level around one killer sequence, happy to pad out the rest with filler exploration and basic battles - Resident Evil 4 doesn't like to go more than one room or area before it springs its next well-planned, deviously torturous problem for you to either negotiate or, you know, die in.

If we were to use a musical metaphor then if most action-adventure games are like albums then Resident Evil 4 is more like a greatest hits collection.

I'm not going to tell you that Resident Evil 4 is the greatest game of all time, It's not. Indeed, most games will eventually be usurped at one time or another. My favourite games ever have changed as I have grown up with new generations of hardware and new games taking advantage of ever-increasing sophistication. Super Mario Kart and Street Fighter II on the SNES were, for sure, the best games there had ever been. And then along came, say, Final Fantasy VII (and VIII and IX!). After Resident Evil 4 there was, say, an Uncharted 2 to trump it in all ways as a cinematic action-adventure (except for scares and dread).

No, you have to allow games acknowledgement for their time and place as well as their quality. Resident Evil 4 was an out and out pioneer at the time of release and it has inspired and continues to inspire generations of games ever since. But, frankly, even now in 2017 - a staggering 12 years after its first release - this game holds up, It still plays well. It still draws you in. And it will work your nerves.

Play it. Survive it.