We have to keep a sense of perspective.

Of course we do.

Had a helicopter dropped out the sky through the roof of a pub in Liverpool or Leeds the uninjured folks inside and nearby would not have fled or passed by on the other side. Common humanity doesn't have an exclusive postcode.

Yet any born and bred Weegie could not but feel a renewed sense of civic pride that their home town came good when it mattered most. Not just the professionals, either at the scene or in the neighbouring accident and emergency units, impressive though their response and subsequent commitment has been.

But the people who ran into a building whose instability was all too evident, or queued at the blood bank. The surrounding pizza, baker, hotel and chip shops who fed and watered whoever needed it - all night in some cases. At times like these "junk" food is comfort food, no question.

Besides, the urge to do something, anything, to contribute is often overwhelming, and if constructing pizzas is your skill then you offer it up.

The relationship of people to their home town is often an intense one and Glasgow is a city which commands an extraordinary degree of personal loyalty from its citizenry. In other times it was partly an us-against-the-world sort of emotion, as Glasgow struggled to shed the regularly peddled images of slum housing and violent inhabitants.

Neither of these scars has yet been fully healed, but today they tell a small part of the story of a big, brash, confident city whose friendliness is not merely a marketing myth but a daily experience.

You'd better like blethering in Glasgow because you'll get no shopping or travelling done without it. A complete stranger and I bonded over a deconstruction of the Christmas jersey offerings in Marks & Sparks the other day. Hope you finally went for the striped one, pal.

That instinctive connectivity might irritate some, but for most of us it's an affirmation that we operate in a city where an exchange of patter and banter oils the wheels of daily life. It's not just the experience of those who imbibed the gallus gene with their mother's milk, but folks who've come and settled in Scotland's largest town.

For all its social ills it hasn't lost a stubborn sense of chippy resilience.

Glasgow is a difficult city in which to carry off being a snob, even if you hang your hat in the leafier suburbs of an evening. This is a sports mad city, but social mountaineering is not an event ever encouraged or much tolerated.

And all of these qualities were brought into play in the early hours of Saturday morning where all that mattered was how you might help.

The twittersphere lit up with agonised howls from expats, as well as pragmatic pleas from locals. Anyone need a taxi to visit a hospital; we'll take you there free, tweeted Glasgow's largest cab company.

When I was a young journalist a gas explosion wrecked 26 shops on the south side of Glasgow, a disaster compounded by the vehicles in the rooftop car park plunging into the carnage below. That day too saw heroism in the raw.

It was before the age of the ubiquitous mobile phone and I vividly recall a woman in a neighbouring house, who allowed use of her phone to journalists and relatives, setting up a de facto canteen service in her kitchen for the next several hours. She needed to do something.

A few weeks back, to much mockery, Glasgow's new city slogan was unveiled. "People Make Glasgow", hooted natives and commentators alike; whit numpty got paid to come up with the likes of that? But in essence they weren't so much dismissing the sentiment as the thought that anything so self evident should have required so much expensive head scratching and market testing.

Of course people make Glasgow, they sniffed in unison. We knew THAT! It's why they're still conducting interviews for Commonwealth Games volunteers having been over-subscribed by a factor of four.

As it happens, I'm one of these hopefuls.

I belong to Glasgow. Glasgow belongs to me.