In my book, Pop Life, I wrote about the incredible emotional outpouring I experienced watching Ariana Grande on television at her One Love Manchester concert in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing. I remember it with incredible lucidity; in fact, if I think about it too much I’ll be able to summon forth the tears once more with ease. Sometimes things just resonate that bit more deeply, and then, lo and behold, they go on resonating ad infinitum, and there’s bugger all you can do about it – there are always more tears to cry.

I was totally overwhelmed by One Love Manchester, in fact, I was totally overwhelmed by Ariana’s response to the attack. Who the hell was this person (I’d never heard of her before) and how was she managing to handle everything so brilliantly? I spent the concert attempting to drown myself in my own optic secretion before going out and buying all of her records. Turns out they’re pretty good.

Back then I swore that the next time she came to play in Manchester I’d be there in the crowd. And last night I managed to keep my word.

I nearly didn’t make it. We only bought the tickets on the day itself, courtesy of an 11th hour realisation that I could not envisage a reality in which I wasn’t at the show. Thank goodness the organisers had released a last minute ticket allocation or I’d have been forced to haemorrhage my savings, as is customary when using Viagogo. Paying over the odds for something is never fun; rarely is it more dissatisfying than when you know you’re lining the pockets of a bunch of cretinous cowboy fuckheads.

I wasn’t even supposed to be in Manchester on the August bank holiday. I was supposed to be attending a wedding in London before returning to my London home, my London work and the London life I’d been leading (almost) uninterrupted for the best part of two decades.

And yet, somewhat unexpectedly, I now find myself living in the centre of Manchester, working in the centre of Manchester, shopping, eating and drinking in the centre of Manchester, attending Ariana Grande concerts in the centre of Manchester.

At the start of the year a permanent return to Manchester wasn’t even an idea – it was but an unconscious notion, a stirring deep within, of the sort that one might only notice in the small hours amidst a sleepless, contemplative night. I’ve had this before, indeed I’ve even moved back up north before, and perhaps would have stayed had my personal life not been in such a shambles throughout the period in question. But this time the feeling was altogether more persistent, gnawing away at me, the constant sensation that I was no longer existing in the right place.

The bombing was the initial provocation. I wasn’t in town when the attack occurred and it took me a week to get up there and pay my respects at the memorial in St. Ann’s Square. It was horrible, but even then the full extent of the pain only really struck once I switched on the TV to watch the concert. I shared both in Manchester’s mourning and in the community’s sense of collective defiance. I felt it to my core. But I wasn’t there in person and, in retrospect, I should have been. It’s a difficult pill to swallow, the realisation that some random US Disney kid you’ve never heard of is now more Mancunian than you are.

I spent my teenage years trying to flee the north west; I spent my 20s largely AWOL, the perennial outsider, never fully comfortable in London society, never fully accepted back up north. My 30s have been spent trying to engineer a return home. Several attempts failed, but now I’m back, and in a weird way I have Ariana to thank for it.