Good Afternoon from Gray's Inn Road.
Once again today, the newsroom resounds to the high-pitched whine of a drill, with the occasional 'thud thud thud' from a hammer. We've been having a major reorganisation here which has been going on for months, and months and... dare I say.. months. We know it's all for the good but you know how patients sometimes say 'yuk' when they take their medicine...
One person who won't have had to put up with drilling and hammering - providing they've finished the stadium, of course - one Alastair Stewart. He's in Beijing - lucky thing - for the Olympics. Not known for his 100 metre dash, it has to be said, Mr Stewart heads our team reporting from the Olympic city and looking ahead to what lessons our future Olympic City can learn. Al and his gang will be Beijing-based up to and including Friday - so spread the word.
And the word tonight is 'protest'. Just three days before the Greatest Show on Earth kicks off with the sort of bang only Chinese fireworks can produce... a group of demonstrators staged their own little eye-catching show - up a 140ft pole. And among those spreading the 'what about Tibet?' message, a London lass called Lucy Fairbrother. She's being looked after by the Chinese authorities right now but we will be hearing from her Mum on tonight's programme.
A little closer to home - an appalling attack on a woman at a train station near Dartford. What does it say about our society that when a woman asks a group of youngsters to stop smoking at a station, they throw her onto a live railway line? She's lucky to be alive. They're lucky she's alive.
A group of commuters who are NOT lucky though are those who're forced to use what have been officially crowned as 'the busiest train services in the country'...
I remember playing a game when I was young called 'sardines'. You may remember it yourself. The idea of the game is for one person to go off and hide and then all the others to go looking for them. As and when you found the person hiding, you'd hide with them. And this continues until all the people who started out looking are hiding together in the one place - except for Mr Thickee who never bothered to look in your Mum and Dad's big wardrobe in the first place.
It was great fun - because as the game progresses, and more people climb in to the wardrobe, things get tighter and tighter. Mind you, you'd soon begin to realise your best mate has got a bad breath problem, and should use a bit more deodorant.
Well, that's like travelling on the seven fifteen from Cambridge to Kings Cross - or the eight oh-two from Woking to Waterloo. Only, lots of people have got breath problems and far too many skimp on the deodorant. It's not great fun. Oh, and you're paying for the privilege - thousands of pounds every year. We'll be asking the Managing Director of 'First Capital Connect' about the Cambridge service at least.
We'll also be talking to a group of ladies who only recently were walking down the aisle but today were marching on Canary Wharf... when (if they'd waited for a new course being launched by Westminster Council) they could have swung their way from bus-stop to lamppost.
What?
Find out at SIX.
Ben & Salma
