exo : blah

I drive 45 miles to work. It takes about an hour. An hour that, ideally, coincides with the last hour of the today programme on radio 4. Usually this means that I get to hear whoever they interview just after 8. This is often a government minister and seems to feature Charles Clarke disproportionately, although that probably says more about how I feel about him than actually reflecting reality.

The consequence of this is that I spend a chunk of my commute shouting at the radio. I like to pretend it's therapeutic. This morning it was people interviewed about a man asked to take his hat off in a pub as the hat was obscuring the CCTV camera's view of his face. "It's for our safety" one man said. How? In what way does the pub being able to record pictures of you make you safer? I would hazard that most people on the point pf starting fights in pubs don't look round the pub and think "Blimey, a camera. I might just have another orange juice instead."

Usually though, it's politicians that provoke the shouting. There's nothing better than listening to someone avoiding the issue, conflating two unrelated issues or being just plain wrong (hello Charles Clarke) to make me shout at the radio. I try to listen quietly. It usually goes well for the first bit and then I'll cheerfully be told that because the Americans have told us in the past when they were rendering people through the U.K. and they haven't mentioned this lately that they obviously aren't doing it. I then find myself shouting at, in this case, Jack Straw for making use of arguments so tenuous I wonder why not just say that he asked his magic 8 ball and it told him "My sources say no".

Only marginally less annoying is the reverential attitude seemingly automatically accorded to any discussion on classical music.

I can't be alone in doing this. At least I hope I'm not. The problem with cars is it's hard to tell who among your fellow drivers is sitting passively, singing along to the hits of Bon Jovi or shouting at the radio.

The advantage is that you can shout at the radio.