I was in the gym when I first saw the news about the Manchester attack. Sitting on the bike, lost in some thoughts about my thesis, my eyes suddenly focused on the TV above me.

I am known to my friends for saying that gyms are temples of narcissism, so it is to my own chagrin that I have ended up using one for physiotherapy. But it was a peculiarly odd place to hear the news of such horror. The reality was so near, and yet the television report somehow so remote, in a room full of people slogging away myopically on their treadmills. I wandered over to the mat and sat down, looking at my own perfectly whole body in the mirror, and trying to imagine the broken bodies. Trying to visualise the families to whom the unthinkable has happened, not to someone else this time, but to them. And then, staring blankly at myself and failing to take it in, like everyone else I carried on with my “workout”.