Sunday July 8th


MEDIA AND LONDON TRAFFIC

If you saw a woman frantically running down The Strand on Saturday night through the crowds, panting and anxious...that was me, heading the the BBC World Service, my taxi having got stuck in the London traffic. I abandoned the car in Trafalgar Square and hared off to the BBC World Service at Bush House - to no avail as the programme had ended and I had missed my slot for an interview. I was meant to go on to do another programme at Radio 5 Live which is based at White City (which is sort of near Shepherds Bush/Hammersmith-ish). But there could be no question of trying to move in the log-jam that is London on a summer evening, so I stayed put and they found a place for me in a studio and I did the programme from there.

It was about test-tube babies, IVF, and the ethics of all of that. Messy subject. I was glad I had done some preliminary reading - and was actually unexpectedly helped by a comment by the then Cardinal Ratzinger in a rather chatty book God and the World, in which he points out that these things start as something with good intentions, helping childless couples and so on, but they cross an important threshhold, replacing the act of love with a technological act and this has important consequences and change our relationship with each other and with nature.

I am not sure how many people listen to Radio 5, but this particular programme went well and the juxtaposition of the subject with the "Live Earth" "Save the Planet" worldwide pop concert events somehow worked because one could point to a need for a sense of valuing our human ecology, the problems created by inability to keep moral debates in pace with technological developments...

Home late.