Hacks – the fifth emergency service

The explosion ringing in your ears, your heart pumping and rattling in your ribs, and sweat is dripping from your brow thanks to years of over indulgence and a cocktail of fear and excitement. You are running, faster and faster, against the fleeing crowd to the heart of the action flanked by Firemen, police chewing doughnuts and paramedic team – congratulations you are a first responder – you are a journalist.

Reassuring then that the next generation of the fifth emergency service were overcome with emotion watching a jumpy video of a mini police riot followed some pornographic radio commentary from the grand old US of A.

All it took was a few Italian police to put a boot in on some soap dodger and the cream of the nations aspiring hacks had sweaty palms and were overcome with “terror”, “confusion” “fear” and loss of self control. No hope of objective reporting any time soon then.

I on the other hand was thinking, cool. I fear that years of studying volcanic eruptions that obliterate everything and everybody, floods that wash away people’ homes and earthquakes that wipe out the population of a small town, has left me a little tainted.

We geographers you see are only interested in something if a good few people have died a horrible death, swept away by a lahars or plyroclastic cloud. We are not moved by scenes of police brutality – that’s just Euro 2000 rehashed without the water cannons.

I refused to join in the game of wow – check out my vocab. I did something worse. I did nothing at all. I bottled it. You see there is something quite scary about being the only dissenting voice in the crowd and you guys scare me. That is why I write. Because speaking out in person is confrontational. Doing it in print is a source of debate.