The Fog Of War

Weather

The weather and the water continue to dominate proceedings.

We are very much in the calm before the storm. There has been flooding in some areas since the torrential rain on Friday, compounded by blocked drains in some areas, but The Big One will be when the Thames bursts its banks either tomorrow or on Wednesday.

And it's not if, it's when. The Environment Agency tells us we can only sit, wait, and get our valuables to higher ground as the water that's just hit Oxford makes its way down the Thames into Berkshire.

In the newsroom it's like a trench as the troops count down the hours before they go over the top. A few members of staff have already been flooded and are off work as they try to cope - one or two more are back in work despite having houses under a couple of feet of water. One newsreader is performing admirably to read out flood warnings every half an hour without referring to the fact that her house, and her partner's, are both under water.

This morning we had three or four reporters out in various parts of the county that have been worst hit. When they returned to base it was almost as though our scouts had come back to the war room to pass on valuable information on the enemy's movements. The news bulletins begin, 'It's not over yet'. The Environment Agency spokespeople make hourly appearance.

It's an electric, uncomfortable atmosphere, alive with both the sense that a big news story is hoving into view - we are, after all, journalists - and the very real fear for many people that their houses and cars are on borrowed time. This afternoon I have had one colleague leaning on my shoulder, trying not to cry, softly despairing as the Environment Agency confirmed her house was in a Flood Warning zone. "I can't take this ... I've just got too much to do. I don't have a spare second this week, my house can't flood."

Another colleague, who only works here at weekends and lives a stone's throw from the Thames in Caversham, has been texting me from her weekday workplace. "Do you know which bits of Caversham have been evacuated? Is it where I live?" The apprehension is palpable. It turns out it's a false alarm - Caversham's residents are going nowhere, yet - but I've already offered to help her bail her house out when the time comes. It's all but inevitable.

You even start to wonder whether we're all that safe on top of our hill in Caversham Park. We'll never flood, but what about water supplies? There are over 300,000 people in Gloucester with nothing to drink and that's terrifying. Little things, like how would you flush the toilet? How do you feed a baby without water or power to warm a bottle? It feels like our colleagues further to the West - further along the front line - have already gone over the top, and we're the next in line.

And what did Blackadder do when next in line? He made a beeline for the general's war room by any spurious means he could, so that's exactly what I've done. I am Chief Mapper in the war room, having drawn up an interactive flood map for the radio station's website.

The idea came to me on Sunday night at home - we had more than 80 photos on the website but no good way to browse them, other than plod through one by one. So over the space of four hours I transferred the whole lot into a customised Google Map: working out where the photos were taken (most people who sent them in were very specific), producing a small thumbnail image linking to a bigger version, adding little blue markers in the correct places which open a photo when you click.

Then, this morning, it occurred to me the map had so much more potential. So I highlighted the stretches of Berkshire rivers under Flood Warnings using a thick yellow line, and gave ones with the All Clear a green line (when the worst hits, it'll go red). Now there are red markers alongside the blue ones - these allow you to listen to reports from BBC correspondents who've been in the various affected areas today. Green markers let you play Youtube videos of flooding in the Berkshire road where the marker sits.

I'm quite proud of it, and it's had a bit of attention in the newsroom which is great - I just hope it proves useful to people outside the newsroom in the big, wide, worried world. Keeping it updated is a round-the-clock job so I'm sleeping with my mobile by my side, and it needs constant maintenance - one of our reporters has just emailed me to state his "devastation" that his audio report won't play properly. But it's a thousand times easier to access our coverage with the map, so with a bit of luck, it'll be worth it.

And with a bit of luck, there won't be too much to add in the coming days. Ready, men?

It's Just So Wet

Weather

That's all that's been going through my head for the past few hours. I drove home from the radio station at 6pm and the rain had started again, sloshing down on already-sodden roads running north out of Reading. Berkshire hasn't had this kind of weather in half a century.

Which, in a way, is brilliant news for a radio station. We're the first port of call for people needing to know what the weather is doing and, especially, people stuck in the inevitable travel chaos. The M4 suffered a landslide, the railway stations shut down, there were power cuts even to homes that might have avoided the floods, and A roads across the county soon became gridlocked.

For the whole of Friday the whole radio station set about the county like scalded earwigs. We dropped pretty much everything and went for wall-to-wall flood coverage straight from reporters and eyewitnesses in the areas worst affected, like Maidenhead and Newbury. Almost everyone you talk to has something interesting to say, something they've seen or experienced that's unique, and we piled it all onto the air.

In the mean time the website received dozens and dozens of emails with brilliant photos. My colleague Linda fought her way through this veritable flood of emails yesterday and it was my turn today - click here to see the pictures, they're stunning. Or click here to read about a stable that had to evacuate twenty horses in four feet of water.

Even the Friday night sport show became a two-hour sport and flooding special, with yours truly anchoring a phone-in for the first time.

I don't think I will ever forget my first caller: a gentleman named Matt who had been stuck in traffic for nine hours, and missed his wedding rehearsal as a result. He was stuck in traffic in the classic car he'd rented for his big day. He sounded so resigned to his situation, he was almost happy.

Matt's nine hour ordeal was a Sunday morning drive compared to others though. One man was trying to get to Leicester to take a woman out for a first date, but couldn't get past Didcot; a family on the same road were going home to Wigan from Butlins in Bognor; a bloke from Glasgow had spent 14 hours trying to get to a festival in Newbury, only to end up stuck a mile outside the entrance.

Today things initially calmed down a bit, but this afternoon we've been taking call after call as the floods continue and traffic backs up again. And it might get even worse - the Environment Agency told us Berkshire and London are at "serious risk" of flooding tomorrow night or Monday as the Thames threatens to burst its banks. If that happens, Monday's going to be an insane day.

(By the way, if you see that "serious risk" quote elsewhere, I take full responsibility. I discovered how to flash news items across BBC wires today, and that quote from our interview has since appeared on News 24 and News Online. I'm a proud man.)

Small Dog, Soft Snow

Weather

A recipe for fun and games if ever there was one. The coming of snow is always a special event here, even if it's routine in other parts of the world.

So waking up to a new, white blanket over the gardens and driveways meant a celebration was in the offing. Toby and I decamped to the cricket pitch to make the most of the tardy winter weather.

How can you resist? It's simple: throw the ball, make a dog happy. Repeat many times. Soon the snow was freckled with the prints of scurrying paws.

Dog and owner were quick to enjoy the snow while it was still there - although even now, at gone midnight, some still lingers on the pavements and hedges outside.

Now we're both curled up asleep, hoping for more snow tomorrow. Goodnight!

Bit Nippy Out

Weather

Windy, isn't it! If we were talking outside, I'd be having to SHOUT INCREDIBLY LOUDLY AT YOU TO MAKE MYSELF HEARD!

Good job we're not. But my word, the drive to work this afternoon was like a half hour tour of wartorn Bosnia. Cars clumped in small, uncertain convoys, swerving this way and that, avoiding fallen branches and impromptu lakes littering the country roads. I half expected to be shelled.

My dog, Toby, had a hard time dealing with the weather too. Yesterday I ran out of time to take him for a walk so, when he gave me a look of absolute disgust, I promised faithfully to take him to the cricket pitch today. Then I woke up and saw the trees bent horizontal in the wind outside the house.

But a promise is a promise, so off we went: the dog looking utterly unperturbed, me wrapped up in coat, scarf and hat, armed with a tennis ball and racquet.

The moment I hit the tennis ball for the first time, we both knew it would be an entertaining half an hour or so. Having given the ball a fairly hefty whack up into the air away from me, it stopped dead in mid-air, then arrowed back in towards my head. The wind was so strong that I needed some considerable force to dispatch the ball into the breeze - but watching the dog try to correct for wind was an extremely funny reward. To his credit he got the hang of it fairly quickly.

I think the dog far preferred the relative calm of sitting on the ground, waiting for the wind to blow the ball back, to the alternative: me pelting the ball into the distance with the wind behind it. When I tried it I could almost hit the ball from one side of the pitch to the other. The dog was most unimpressed (but well enough educated in cricket etiquette to scamper around, and not over, the square).

All in all the wind didn't pose me many problems, but tomorrow could be a different story. I'm supposed to be in Bristol at 2pm and I've got a good couple of hours of work to do at the radio station first. Given the state of the trains today, not to mention the state of the M4, I've got no idea how I'm going to make it. I wonder if we've got video conferencing technology...

Whether The Weather

Weather

Anyone else slightly concerned at the weather? I've never really been one for discussing global warming before, but honestly - twelve degrees in January? Everyone knows I get cold very quickly. But not this year. I suppose there were a few time before Christmas when I was in Kent that the wind was bitter and icy, and I had to scrape ice off the car. But nothing on the usual. I haven't warn by trademark baggy jumpers. I've had my heating on at night, but this is more because I think I should because it is winter, more than the fact that I probably need to. But what to do? Kill a cow? Recycle more? (I already have five different bins, I'm not sure if I can cope with more).

In A Word

Weather

It really is so very very hot.

DayoRimet #12b: Cole Of The Month

Special Events , Weather

Well what a goal that was.

I have always said Joe Cole is rubbish. I saw him play for West Ham against Manchester City a good few years ago and he had an abysmal game - I couldn't understand why so many people rated him. And I never saw an improvement at Chelsea either. I've been talking rubbish, the man's a living legend, I'm converted. I'll even stick an England flag on my car for him.

Why no Theo Walcott when Owen went off injured in the first minute? Crouch is on a yellow card so we're risking his participation in the first knockout game by sending him on as a replacement. This would have been the perfect game to send young Theo on and give him some experience, or even a goal if he got lucky. It seems a shame he's missed out - maybe he'll get a chance later on though, with the second half just underway.

As for Amy, sod Top Of The Pops. Popworld is where all the cool kids are at these days in terms of clunky old terrestrial music shows. The BBC are now going to be able to drop the ailing behemoth and focus on nimble, fleet-of-foot broadcasts - from big events like Reading festival to smaller affairs demanding ease of mobility like guerrilla gigs.

When It Rains It Pours In London

Weather

It's just another excuse to use the "weather" category. But it's true. It doesn't rain, and then it pours. Buses don't come for ages and then three come at once. I don't see Ollie and OJ for three months and then see both of them in the space of two days. You guessed it, I had lunch with OJ today - and of course the ceremonial scrunchie... on a salt and pepper pot...aka its wheels... in honour of Ol's driving test (which he passed... see below... and we're all very proud - twice in one week!) Anyway, we had a long and enjoyable catch up. OJ's still a stubborn sod, but at least he did eventually admit that his hair needed cutting... He's also very tall. I had to stand on tiptoes to kiss him. I'd forgotten about that. But nothing else to report really. Some of the contents "stays on tour" as it were. All good fun though. I miss them both.

Well... The Weather...

Weather

... actually, not the weather at all. Since we are unable to post comments at the moment, I think I'll just send a collective "well done" and "we're all very proud of you" to Ollie. Because we are. And it's all very exciting. Especially the new "weather" category!

P.S. Ollie I'm assuming, as the only salaried member amongst us, lunch is on you today?!

Why Does It Always Rain On Me

Weather

I think we should create a new category: weather. I checked the met-office website this morning and it told me that it would be warm and dry today. Not sunny, but warm and dry. So I left in a t-shirt and jeans. I returned in the absolute worst rain I have walked in for ages. Soaked to the skin. I don't knwo why my umbrella wasn't in my bag - it is now. My feet are wet. My trousers are wet. Aghh! And I missed a call from Ollie!