Tuesday was a Highbury Star deadline day, so I came in expecting to be rushing around like an idiot by midday.
As it turned out, neither of my stories were needed until later in the week, so I settled down to surf my cyber-patch from the comfort of the news-room.
That lasted about five minutes; before long I was biking along Copnor Road to investigate some collapsed gable walls.
My bike tyres are always low and this makes riding up even a mole-sized hill capable of producing a thin sweat.
As soon as the landscape flattened out the rain began, leaving me soaked, tired and irritable after a bike-ride that wouldn’t trouble an eight-year old.
The second gable-less house I came across yielded both decent pictures and, in open windows, unmistakable signs of life.
I knocked, knocked again, and eventually decided the homeowners just weren’t very security conscious so started snapping away at their poor battered wall.
Just as I was leaving the door opened and a dark-skinned boy, about 7 or 8, looked up at me.
“Are you the guy taking pictures?”
Not expecting this, I said: “I, uh, well, are your parents at home?”
“Don’t worry, he says it’s alright,” he replied, with what I took to be deep scorn at my answering a question with a question.
I asked if “he” wouldn’t mind answering a few questions.
“He doesn’t really speak English,” I was told.
And that was when his father, a stocky, turbaned man named Abdul who clearly thought I was trying to extort money from his son, arrived on the scene.
With the boy acting as translator I grabbed a few quotes and made a hasty exit (another four family members had gathered and were muttering with disapproval).
I re-entered the newsroom smiling smugly.
“Are you doing a piece on gable walls?” Karen asked.
“Yep” I replied.
“Don’t read today’s News, you’ve been beaten to it.”
Later in the week I spoke to the reporter who had stolen my story. He had gone out first thing on Monday morning and interviewed everyone involved.