May you live in interesting times...

When foot-and-mouth disease hit the UK in 2001, I was a moderately experienced reporter on Animal Pharm, covering North America and Australasia. But we were short-staffed and we had no UK reporter in place at the time, so it fell to me to tackle the issue.

What happens to you when you are at the coal face in an honest-to-goodness crisis like that is a curious, in some ways distasteful, thing. A little bit like war reporting I imagine.

Working days are more exciting. More stimulating. More challenging. More intense. The reporter feels more valuable, has a sense of making a serious contribution. Playing a part in something important. Friends and family are actually interested in what you have to say over the dinner table (at least for the first month or two, they are...). They were without doubt the most exciting months I've spent working on Animal Pharm.

And at the same time, if you have any sort of a conscience (and most of us do), they were hellish.

Even if your perspective and your goals are a little different to mainstream news reporters, you can't help but encounter stories of devastating pain and loss on a daily basis. Grown men crying over the loss of a herd built up over generations. Or weeping in the knowledge that they were responsible for bringing 'dangerous contact' animals into their district and so responsible too for culls on all the neighbouring farms.

And then there's the generous daily sprinkling of stories of contributory governmental, ministerial or departmental ineptitude, sloth and pigheadedness.

It's a rare reporter who isn't personally affected by it somehow; who doesn't develop at least a modicum of contempt for ministries, politicians and civil servants in general. Partisanship is frequently the result, despite one's best efforts to fight it.

I still have a recurring nightmare that comes complete with the smell of charred cattle carcasses.

Not to mention a lingering low opinion of the UK's last chief vet and his handling of the epidemic.

So, when I was woken at 5.45am last Friday by the news that we had a suspected case of FMD on our hands once again ("Cheale Meats again? Surely not?"), yes, I was in the office well before 7.00am in a state of high excitement.

But at lunchtime you would have found me in John Wesley's church around the corner, asking for those preliminary test results to come in negative.

But the worst thing of all about last Friday was this discovery.

Four years after the end of the epidemic, despite report after report on the subject, all concluding much the same thing, official UK policy remains to cull.