I have worn the pants of punctuality all day today. I was up in time to get to the gym before the train in to work so arrived at the office springy and feeling very ready to get on with the day. So much so, in fact, that I even started writing a feature that won’t even appear for the next two issues.

Dave called a Link FM meeting for this evening, so I left the office promptly and was on an early train back to Chelmsford. We were delayed (of course), and there was some arguements from the people whose reserved seats were suddenly no longer reserved because the train crew hadn’t had time to put the labels in the back of the seats, but we eventually got to Chelmsford and I jumped in the car for the drive over to the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch.

It’s a long time since I’ve been there, but the drive was still very familiar. I used to do it once a week at least for years and was very reckless on the back road between Brentwood and Harold Wood, taking the corners and lumpy hills far too quickly. This evening, I stuck to a more sedate 40mph. Another sign of impending middle age arriving in my late twenties.

I was one of the first to arrive, and was cornered by Pete the moment he heard about the magazine. He has an idea for a feature and spent the next fifteen minutes doing his best to convince me it would be great in the mag (or even better on the radio as he’d recently turned down a spot on the Oprah show, apparently). I said it wouldn’t really fit, and he explained that I’d obviously missed the point he was trying to get across - that the Internet is a dangerous place full of predators desperately trying to pounce on children.

This argument is my absolute number one pet hate and I have to admit I did rather explode at that point. I wrote a column for PCW a few years back criticising parents who allow their children to roam the Internet unsupervised. Invariably they complain if their kid sees something they shouldn’t, and the blame always falls fairly and squarely on the net. They can’t see that their actions - or lack of action in not supervising their kids - actually makes it more likely that the amount of poen and ‘filth’ online will grow. It’s irresponsible parents that make porn sites so profitable.

If they supervised their kids’ online time there would be no need for age-verification systems. These systems invariably require some kind of credit card payment be made, ostensibly to ‘check the applicant is over 18′. Of course, this doesn’t stop the kid using one of their parents’ cards, so it is a flawed system already, but more seriously it gives the site owner tidy little income income.

So, the more parents let their kids roam around alone online, the more adult checks there will have to be, because the parents expect the purveyors of porn to child-mind them on their behalf and make sure they don’t see top-shelf material. The more adult checks there are, the more evident it will become that online porn is a profitable business. The more obvious this is, the more the industry will grow.

Of course, I argued it far better in the magazine, but it’s gone midnight now and my eyes are heavy.

Once we’d settled down for the meeting, things got on better. I made sure there were a few people between us at the table and sat back to listen to what the others, some of whom I’ve known for ten years, had to say. It was great to hear some of the familiar ideas we tried years ago being brought up again, even though I won’t actually be involved in the broadcast this time around.

The studios will be based in a school again, and during the day the station will be taking in school kids to teach them English, maths and communication skills through working in a live radio station. It’s as ambitious a project as it always has been, and perhaps it’s this ambition that stopped it being awarded its own full-time licence.

The fact it’s not on air all year round, though, makes it all the more special when it launches each summer.

I still have a soft spot for it, being the place I cut my radio teeth. I can even remember my first track. Wild Boys by Duran Duran. It was half past nine on a Wednesday:

Wednesday, 24th June 1992 : Got up at 6am but only slept 2 hours last night. I have had 2 hours sleep in the last 36 hours. I am absolutely knackered. My show went quite well. It was 2 1/2 hours. It is a really difficult thing to do with all the timing etc. You seem to need about 6 pairs of hands to work everything. It is surprising how quickly the time seems to go by and it is difficult to get everything times exactly correctly to be able tp ass on to the news team.

It turned out that the area roped off that I walked through last night at Romford Station was a murder. Someone had their head stamped on until it split open and there was apparently bits of blood stamped into the carpet. A policeman who came into the radio station this afternoon told us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 21st, 2002 at 11:40 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.