BARELY 24 hours after the heart was ripped out of Manchester, thousands of high spirited German and Russian football supporters mingled with the locals in Piccadilly Square.
"We are not afraid to come here," said a German fan en route to Old Trafford. "We don't believe there will be another bomb today. We just want to enjoy the sunshine."
The bombing was "a callous act," said Chief Constable Malcolm Cairns. "We are doing everything we can to return this city to normal." The police have praised the response of the local people and businesses to "clear the debris and help in the investigation to find these bombers".
It is also a tribute to Mancunian resolve that many of those walking around the city centre yesterday expressed a wish to simply get on with their lives.
Two women enjoying the sun on Princess Street, a few hundred metres from the devastation of the Arndale Centre, spoke of their horror at watching hundreds of screaming shoppers fleeing the day before.
"It was so frightening to see these women with cuts all over their faces and the screaming was something else. But we were not frightened to come into town today, after all this is our city. The bombing won't make any difference. The people here are stronger than that."
As he stood on a pavement strewn with glass, a young boy's thoughts were on other, more important events. "Come on, Dad, we have to get home to watch the match," he demanded.
A group of French tourists stood at a police cordon, some of them taking photographs of an empty street. On closer inspection the pavement was covered in glass, and all the windows were shattered.
A red post box was the only object left intact. "I cannot understand why people would want to do this kind of thing. There is no excuse for this. But, yes, it was lucky no one was killed," one of them said.
Nearer to the centre of the explosion, in Corporation Street, the sound of car alarms and those in the shopping precinct was unremitting. The destruction of the area has been shown to the outside world on television. It is a deeply disturbing, ugly sight, which has been compared to the Canary Wharf bombing in London last February. While Saturday's bomb was not as large, it in no way diminishes the horror of seeing a 40ft crater outside the Arndale Centre.
Before 11.30 a.m. on Saturday the area was filled with shoppers and strollers. "Little did they know what was waiting for them," a teenage girl remarked.
But it seems that nothing can dampen the air of a festival in progress in the centre of Manchester, in part due to the thousands of tourists and football fans who have made the city their home for the Euro 96 tournament.
Although many of the football fans have been moved out of their hotels beside the Arndale Centre and rehoused in the G Mex Conference Centre near Piccadilly train station, "it won't stop us having a good time," said one French fan.
The fear of many people here was that for a city in need of economic regeneration, terrorism would prevent fans from travelling to the matches. And, perhaps significantly for Mr Andrew Attwood, owner of City Cafe, that they would not part with any "hard cash."
But within hours of the bombing on Saturday evening, and despite a one mile exclusion area in the city, Mr Attwood was serving customers at pavement tables.
Again, one of his customers played down the "terrible sadness of what had happened. "Some people think the northwest has become a target for terrorism. I saw some horrific things today, but we're a hard lot up here.