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You’d think Britain was an island of pure coal and that last night’s rain had been not water but parrafin. The fire-fighters are striking and every official organisation seems to have fallen victim to a paralysing paranoia. Smoking has been banned at Chelmsford station - but if it is so dangerous then why was it allowed in the first place? Why allow people to smoke at all, in the hope that when there is no strike the engines will get there in time.

A report on the radio last night warned listeners not to make toast for fear it may burn down your house. Breakfast TV this morning reported the deaths of three unfortunate people caught up in house fires last night - but never made it clear how many die on a regular night.

Metro, London’s free newspaper, printed a special message along the bottom of its front page.

Look a bit closer at the small print to the right of the bright red banner and you’ll see what all the fuss is about - the paper you are holding is a potential death trap:

A couple of dozen tube stations have been closed - I walked to ITN in the rain - and office gossip no longer revolves around TV and scandal, but the fabled green goddess engines being used by the army, navy and airforce as they step in to fill the firemen’s vacant shoes.

It’s strange, but it seems almost all of us have seen one out on the street, each time accompanied by a police car (and on one occasion apparently broken down on the back of a truck). I’ve seen two myself - one on Clerkenwell Road as I walked to the tube after the show, and the other back in Chelmsford, plodding slowly across the waterlogged floodplain.

I find this strange. You can go days without seeing a fire engine, yet now the green goddesses are out on the streets we see them everywhere. Is it propaganda - the government making us feel safer by showing us the delapidated, ageing trucks sent out to save us? Is it that regular fire engines move so fast we never see them, while these creep around, showing their age? Or is it more sinister, reflecting the disgracefully high number of hoax calls that have been made over the last 24 hours? Or the dramatic increase in cases of arson seen since the strike began?

Hmmm…

Bonnie, the outdoor cat the cries on the pavement outside the flat, is sitting by the door in the rain. What is cat etiquette in weather like this? She purrs when I come home and wraps herself around my ankles, and rolls over when you crouch down to tickle her. She won’t go home because she’s bullied by her sister, and instead does her best to slip into the block and run up the stairs.

She’s not my cat, though, and she doesn’t live here, so I shouldn’t let her in, but I don’t like looking out to see her sitting out in the damp, waiting for the next shower of rain.

I see her owners’ house is up for sale. I hope they don’t leave her behind.

Lots of radio fun today. I’m enjoying the breakfast show bits with Phil and Sandy - done two with them this week. The LBC newsroom was really buzzing when I arrived there this afternoon. Sometimes, like all offices, I guess, you get a real feeling of electricity in the air. Loads of enthusiasm, and a buzz of efficiency and things going on.

The show went smoothly, topped off by a fast-moving Q&A phone-in for the last half hour. Some quite discursive questions, which I always think work far better as they are more relevant to a wider section of the audience than specific questions about specific problems on specific systems.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 14th, 2002 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Journal, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.