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Innocence is a wonderful thing. It makes you send emails like this to magazines:

It gives me pleasure to send this message in order to apply for a free subscription in your valuable magazine due to my very limited resources .In addition , I live in a remote rural area with no cultural facilities at all . Awaiting for a positive reply , please contact at the following address :

Mr. [name removed]

[removed]

[removed]

Tiznit

Morocco

Sincerely your’s

I don’t think today was the best of my broadcasting career. The breakfast show interview was a bit lacklustre. I missed out on a couple of the facts I’d learnt last night, which would have been good to throw in to round things out.

Anyway, you can’t dwell on things like that so by the time I got to ITN this evening I’d all but forgotten about it. Just as I arrived, though, there was talk of a plane crashing into the Pirelli building in Milan, and moments later it flashed up on the telly screens that hang from the ceiling. It all sounded horribly familiar. I knew the building, too - it was right next to the hotel I stayed in last month.

Suddenly the LBC office felt very full. People were talking about the news, standing in groups, and the phones were working hard. There was a lot of chatter, a lot of reading, and a lot of concentrated flicking back and forth on the televisions.

Gordon and I watched the news unfolding on one of the televisions in studio 2 (the other one was showing Richard and Judy) while trying to concentrate on questions for the show. By six, though, the web sites were reporting that the pilot had radioed in an SOS call just before crashing, and it looked as though it was not terrorism after all, in spite of initial assumptions.

We sat in the atrium while we ate our dinner and chatted about the work we’d been doing. It seems we had both been testing cameras, purely by chance.

The show itself went fairly well. We had three iPods to give away, courtesy of PC World. Fantastic prizes, and I would have loved to have won one myself, but I think it’s generally considered bad form if presenters or writers win prizes destined for listeners or readers.

When we opened the switchboard to take entries it filled up immediately. I don’t think we’ve ever had it so busy on The Lab before. Every line was flashing red and there was some frantic answering and scribbling going on through the glass.

I was still feeling quite good from that on the train home when the driver asked for our attention. That’s always a bad sign. He explained that we’d be stopping at Gidea Park, the town that named itself after a group (or was it the other way around), for ‘quite a while’. He didn’t explain why. Immediately, out came the mobile phones as two thirds of the carriage called home to warn people they would be late.

Good as his word, the driver brought us to a halt at Gidea Park and opened the doors so we could get out for a wander. He suspected someone had commit suicide in front of a train at Brentwood (anagram: bored town). Steve reckoned on it being a three hour stop, which would condemn my car to a night spent locked in the car park.

I was starving - I always am on a Thursday - so I got off and investigated Gidea Park in search of shops. It had been raining and smelt mildly of the seaside, although I don’t know why. After a couple of wrong turns I found an all-night supermarket, so bought crisps and Smarties and took them back to the train.

In the end, we were only stuck there for 25 minutes, so it could have been far worse. We made some extra stops, and sped past the small huddle of yellow-coated policemen on the track half way between Brentwood and Harold Wood looking at body parts on the track.

Very grim.

I feel sorry for the driver. It must have been awful.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 18th, 2002 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.