Breaking News

I woke up on Friday morning to a text from my flatmate telling me to put on the TV and wishing me luck for what he knew would be a very busy day at work.

I was glued to the news coverage of the earthquake in Japan and the tsunami which followed, right up to the moment I left the house. I had 30 minutes away from it whilst I headed in to the newsroom then spent the next ten hours either watching other channels' coverage, or actually working on our own.

My first week working on national news was the week that terrorists blew themselves up on the London Underground so I learnt very quickly how to push my feelings about things like that to one side so I could do my job without being overwhelmed by the constant barrage of disaster and human suffering.

I've found the events in Japan quite hard to watch though - possibly because of the sheer amount and incredible quality of the footage of the quake in progress and the water sweeping across the countryside.
The aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami was heart-breaking to watch but there is very little video of the event itself. Watching the news at the moment is like being tuned in to a Hollywood disaster film... over and over and over.

I grabbed this photo about an hour before we went on air with the evening bulletin - I needed to just sit in the gallery for five minutes whilst it was empty and quiet to get myself together.

As I write this a few days later I am watching live coverage of a second hydrogen explosion at one of the nuclear reactors, as reports come in of 2000 bodies found on two shorelines in Miyagi Prefecture, and a 6.2 aftershock a couple of hours ago but thankfully no second tsunami...

We as a global people fight over who owns which piece of land, who worships which God, who has the most resources (oil, food, money)... but things like this should remind us all that we don't own this planet, we have no right to any of it, and we all need to support one another if we are to continue living on it.