Fog? In England? In December? Surely not!

Having lived on this fair isle for all my years of existence I've witnessed quite a lot of fog, snow, rain, wind and hail and I'm confident that all of these things are commonplace in December.

Last week my girlfriend and I were turned away from Heathrow when our flight to Munich was among the hundreds cancelled due to the weather. The cancellation of the flight was completely understandable given the conditions - the visibility was so bad that flying would surely not have been safe.

What was amazing to me was the fact that nobody at Heathrow seemed to be in any way prepared for the prospect of bad weather at this time of year. We arrived on Wednesday to a terminal packed so full of people that as soon as we entered we were unable to move and were soon turned away and told to call the airline from home.

There were no staff explaining what was going on, no announcements and no notices displayed anywhere, nor were there any alternative facilities for getting inside the airport to escape the cold.

On Thursday (Day 4 of the bad weather) we returned to discover that a long, narrow, unheated tent had been erected outside the entrance to the terminal. Once again, however, there was nobody telling people where to go, no signs displaying information and no obvious system for processing the vast numbers of people who were unable to fly.

If we'd been attempting to fly from a provincial airport in a third world country staffed by part-timers who needed to get back to their goat herds the crap organisation would have been understandable. For the busiest airport in the world to be so utterly incapable of handling such mindblowing twists of fate as inclement British weather in December is a joke.

Having said all that, we had a lovely time and Munich is an amazing city. Just don't try and get there from Heathrow if the sun isn't shining.

Binge drinkers FM

This is the package I recorded for my Radio News Reporting class that I handed in on Monday.

The piece examines an initiative that has been announced by Lambeth Council to curb binge drinking in the borough in the run up to Christmas by means of a poster campaign warning people of the dangers of overdoing it in the pub.

I spoke to a Labour councillor, bar manager and police officers about the scheme and they were all really helpful in making contributions to the story.

I also put in some long hard hours in various pubs in Lambeth to ensure the story was as balanced and thorough as possible. It was tough but I'm glad I stuck at it.



It was hard work getting it all done (24 hour Cool Edit Pro marathons are definitely not for me) but I'm really pleased with the end result. Thanks to everyone that contributed to the piece.

One for the paedants

As I was travelling to university on the tube this morning, I heard an announcement that brought to mind Chris Horrie's 'Fresh fish sold here' story in an early lecture on my journalism course:

'Ladies and gentlemen, due to necessary engineering works there is no service on the Waterloo and City line this weekend.'

I think a Freedom of Information Act request into how much unnecessary work London Transport carries out on tube lines might be in order.

Privacy laws in The Times

There was an interesting article in The Times yesterday that I think would be useful ahead of the law exam I'm really looking forward to taking next week.

A judge has granted an injunction preventing a man whose wife had an affair with a public figure from revealing the identity of the celebrity on the grounds that it will adversely affect his own wife and children.

He ruled that the husband owed a duty of confidence to the adulterer and that revealing his identity would cause undue stress to the adulterer's wife, who has already threatened suicide.

The article in full is here and there's a comment piece that accompanied that article by The Times legal editor here.

NUS Student Accommodation Survey launch

I went to the launch of the NUS Student Accommodation Cost Survey at the Marylebone campus of Westminster University yesterday.

The survey is intended to define accommodation costs for UK students and to improve the value for money that they get, be it in institutional accommodation, private halls of residence or privately rented housing.

The aim of the survey is a valid one and will hopefully lead to significant improvements in the standard of student accommodation. The talk was interesting, with the ever-entertaining Boris Johnson pitting the Tory point of view against Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister.

Veronica King, the NUS VP for welfare, was also on the panel and she made a strong case for the need for action to ensure students are not frozen out of higher education by spiralling accommodation costs. Despite the success of the debate I came away from the event wondering how much difference the NUS is actually capable of making.

Nobody could deny that it is very good at organising events, rallying support and getting its message across, but as with the march against increasing tuition fees that Rachael and I covered for Smoke News, I'm not convinced that the government takes it seriously enough.

As I'm writing this I can find no evidence on the internet that the Admission:Impossible campaign earlier this year has prompted any revision of government policy. I hope that's not a pattern.