Good afternoon.
I read in a magazine, last night, that a classic Ferrari went at auction recently to a Londoner for over £5 million. My ten year old son believes his life would be complete and his earthly calling met if, one day, he owned a Bugatti Veron - cost c.£1 million. And, first thing this morning, one of my favourite bosses told me he was leaving his modest family car at the railway station in future, and coming into work on the train because the congestion charge plus parking was costing about £200 a month. So, what Ken has done, so far, to the costs of motoring in and around the capital is changing some people's habits whilst leaving others with their exhaust-pipe dreams in tact.
We have, today, been wrestling with Ken's latest foray into our highway habits: a £25 congestion charge for band G cars - they range from old polluters, via big old conventional people-carriers, to his arch-enemy - the diesel guzzling, 4X4 Chelsea tractor. At the same time, 68 types of car will now go free. So, is it a congestion charge or a carbon foot-print imposte? And, for every big old guzzler that is forced into the great parking lot in the sky, how many funny little, tree-hugger-mobiles will slip onto the roads in their place? Is more better? Does size matter? Is it a coincidence that he promised £400 million to help cyclists, just yesterday? We will ask him some of these things live in the studio tonight.
We won't, tonight, ask him about drink - let alone drugs. But we would ask Dwain Chambers about drugs, if he was in the studio. But he won't be because he is too busy training, having just been selected for the UK Athletics team despite the fact that UK Athletics didn't want him and despite the fact that he was, in the past, a proven drug abuser. Jon is on the starting blocks to make sense of this odd example to put before our young 2012 hopefuls.
Not hoped for but certain, are death and taxes according to Ben Franklin. Taxes have long been held in contempt by many who pay them, but not so death. That is changing according to a traditional East End undertaker who has a black, glass-sided coach, plus four in hand. His is a worrying yet fascinating story.
Rambo is just a worrying story which the delicious Lucy is very unsure about. She'll tell you why at 6. Sly Stallone, you have been warned: don't mess with Ms Cotter.
Dan, our handsome Director, is chewing gum at the moment and She Who Must Be Obeyed, Ms Faye, (delightful in trousers and an oddly stylish top today,) is chanting "Mastication for the nation" in a sort of Jamaican accent.
It reminds me of a joke involving a judge and a defendant but we are not yet past the 9 o'clock watershed so I will leave it there.
Robin is still waxing eloquent about his fog pictures from yesterday and what a glorious, crisp spring day it has been: poet or meteorologist, the boy will make words sing for you at 6.
The London papers will still be on Macca and Mucca's case plus whatever sells copies - can't blame them: the mega-rich paper owners still have to eat and, after today, pull a little more from their gilt-edged piggy banks to pay for bringing that Roller or Ferrari in from the suburbs, or even across Kensington.
I know, your heart isn't quite bleeding but we all have to share this place, so live and let live.
See you at 6 and then we're all walking home.
Alastair and Nina.
