Well, this morning was a whole new experience, doing the breakfast show trail by ISDN rather than over the phone. I took the battery out of my clock, turned off the water boiler and considered unplugging the freezer for ten minutes to stop the background noise, but in the end it stopped its whirring just before the ISDN box started chirping so it was all OK.

I do enjoy these Thursday mornings when I can have a bit of a lie in and still get to work on time. I guess it’s because of not going to the gym, but it feels like a real lay in, even though it’s only an extra half hour and I actually get to the office earlier that normal.

I arrived there this morning to find a voicemail from IRN about the trail I’d just done on LBC. They wanted to know if I would do an interview and promised to call back in fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, by the time they did, the office had started to fill up and there was far too much background noise, so I hunkered down in a corner of the lab and we did five minutes, or so, which will probably be about seven seconds by the time it gets to air.

The show this evening went well. Flying solo again as Gordon is off somewhere exotic. He sent a brief email yesterday to wish me luck and let me know he had arrived safely back from his snow monkey-watching trip to Japan.

Sue, who I used to work with when she was a news reporter on PCW, was one of the guests, on the phone from her home in Canada. It was great to chat with her again, and she came across as very relaxed and knowledgeable. It’s a shame we didn’t have time for a natter when we’d done, but my next guest was waiting and we had to move on.

There is a lot of concern about this ‘winter projectile vomiting disease’ at ITN at the moment. We were reading about the contingency plans on the intranet, which include immediately reporting any instances to senior staff, who will arrange for a clean-up team to come out and dispose of it safely so that the germs aren’t spread.

It all sounds very nasty. Apparently you have no notice that it’s going to happen until you throw up about ten feet through the air. An annual event, apparently, although not normally on this scale.

Still waiting to hear back from (book) publisher Jeremy. He much have had my letter by now. The Times emailed to say thanks but no thanks to my feature idea. They liked it, they said, but had already commissioned someone else to write exactly the same thing. They did ask me to pitch them some more ideas if I have them, and asked that I think of them before The Guardian.

No word back from my other pitches to the consumer mags.

1. I am a number. 843522.
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2. Cream crackered
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3. In demand
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