Such as is life these days, the conventional media were catching up with people on the ground who were already tweeting. It didn't take a genius to realise that, at the very least, hopes for those in the police helicopter must be dim. What must their families have been going through? What about the friends and relatives that knew their folk would be in that pub? The people celebrating a well-earned Friday. The locals in their usual seats.
Twitter was inundated with shocked and incredibly descriptive front line 'citizen journalism' accounts. But before we create an idealistic view, a good number of egocentric idiots were tweeting pathetic jokes. The cyber world has a sad and unpleasant unreality at times.
In the real world, men and women were helping their fellow men and women, whether ordinary folk like you or me, or the emergency services soon to arrive on the scene. All of them confronted with a horror none of us wants to experience and will last in the mind for years to come.
If an experienced politician like Jim Murphy, who was there as it happened, could not hide the shock when interviewed, you knew there was worse news to come.
The firefighters and ambulance crews. The police. Facing up to horrific scenes. Just a job? Taking responsibility for others' lives. Just a job? Backed up by a close knit well-oiled machine but alone in their thoughts. Alone in the pictures they will take home with them.
The media focus on a man in despair who has lost his father. He is angry because the worker on the helpline can't give him an answer because she doesn't have it, ironically because of systems intended to ensure some consideration for relatives. No-one in the media explains that or explores that. Away from the camera, the workers and the son are both left with the pain.
And as the day goes on, we hear little of the building control workers, the housing staff, the social workers, the community workers, all pulled in to support the city and its people.
Watching, you want there to be a link. "I've had a drink in the Clutha loads of times. Usually when I need the loo on the way back from Hampden". As if it associated you with the tragedy. The disassociated horrors on the TV come home when you know the place, the people.
Why doesn't that happen with Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Bangladesh? The same people as us dragging each other out of the fallen buildings. Are they so different from the Glaswegians on Friday?
Burdzeyeview writes a moving and insightful account of the people who responded, relating it perhaps a bit too sentimentally to qualities in a nation. They are qualities we'd all want to see in a nation and we certainly saw them from Glaswegians on Friday night. But they are not national qualities. They are qualities displayed by people who have remembered how to relate to people. It is the human condition uncorrupted.
The people who stood by each other are priceless. The public service workers still facing the harsh reality on the ground, grieving for colleagues and treating the traumatised in hospitals and in the community, are priceless too. But, to be harshly political at what might be seen as an inappropriate time, the attacks on their jobs, pay and pensions shows exactly the price government puts on them.
John Stevenson
