I half woke up in early hours of this morning at what sounded like a distant but large explosion. The noise seemed to be approaching. My befuddled mind rather calmly wondered if this was the nuclear strike on London that I have been predicting since I was about five years old and I waited to see if it would reach Shepherd's Bush and rip my house apart in a scene reminiscent of the TV show "Threads". I didn't panic at all about this prospect, partly I think because I believed I was only dreaming. Then I thought I felt the house shake a bit.
Had Al Quaida finally succeeded in their ultimate goal of destroying Shepherd's Bush, which they so pathetically failed to do on 21/7, the gay idiots? To be honest I was a bit tired and had by now passed the whole thing off as the kind of crazy dream I am often having, even thinking to myself, "I could write about my overactive imagination in Warming Up today, as Sunday's are traditionally a quiet day and this is probably the best I can do."
By the time I was awake several hours later I had pretty much forgotten about the whole thing, but then I looked up the news on the BBC website to discover the news of a large oil terminal in Hertfordshire. Even then it took me a while to make the connection - surely I couldn't have heard the explosion from here. But the report said the blast happened at just after 6am, which I realised would probably match up with my crazy nuclear bomb dream and there were reports of the boom being heard a hundred miles away. I didn't know if Hertfordshire was more than a hundred miles away from West London, but gradually I began to realise that my dream hadn't been a dream at all. I had been woken up by something happening in Hertfordshire. How loud must the noise have been if you lived next door? It's incredible that, as I write, there are no fatalities from this terrible event.
Later at the BBC I looked out over North London with Leona, the producer of the Andrew Collings show at a dark cloud in the distance. "Is that the smoke from the fire?" she asked.
"It can't be. It's too far away for us to see it surely" I replied, having learned nothing.
