It's 3.40am and I've more or less given up all hope of sleeping.
Before we even know how many poor people have died or been injured in tonight's attacks in London, let me say I'm sorry. I wish it wasn't happening. I understand why people are afraid. I'm scared too. That's what the terrorists intend. It's not really about tourism or people who work in London: it's about destroying our confidence to carry on with a normal life.
But I feel I need to understand - not excuse - what terrorists do and move towards making things better.
I switched on Sky 1 at 10.30pm for the News Review. I watch it regularly because I like to know what the enemy are saying and I regard Sky News as the enemy, along with BBC News and ITV News. It's a lack of balance thing: Sky, like ITV doesn't seem to be able to get out of London. The BBC? Well, I don't want to go there - not now.
Of course, Sky had picked up the story of terrorist attacks at London Bridge and Borough Market so the News Review was cancelled. The Sky guy is their regular weekend man and he did fine. I heard him sigh a couple of times as the night wore on but he held the line quite well. It's not easy this broadcasting in an emergency: he had pictures and interviews with journalists, passersby (not all reliable) and a guy claiming to be an expert because he'd been in the army, all flying at him. There were occasional breaks in the presentation as reporters were forced by police to move away from the danger zone and there were many, many repetitions of the same footage of a police van flying along a London street.
At one point, I switched to BBC News. I don't know who the presenter was but she held things together very well. She was calm, professional and offered frequent 'recaps' for people just tuning in. At once point she had to apologise for a police officer who was trying to make a restaurant full of people take cover and ended up calling one man a c**t because he was paralysed with fright and still standing up. If that's the worst thing that happens on her shift...
After a while, I started to channel hop between Euronews, RT (Russia Today) and Al Jazeera.
Euronews is usually pretty objective. They didn't have a 'man on the spot' but they had a man in the studio sifting all the information that was coming his way for pure fact. He was better than either the Sky or the BBC person in that respect. There was the occasional silence as he weighed up the information he was being fed, but he was the first to announce that it looked like there was a second attack and the first to suggest maybe the third attack wasn't anything to do with terrorism.
We all know the problem with RT. They work for Putin. Their studio team went fairly fast from 'look at these terrible pictures - and no, we don't actually have any news from London for you' to 'here's a professor who will interpret what's going on and give you reasons for it.' The professor gave us a Europe-wide context for terrorism: terrorists so far have been our own people, not foreigners and we should ask why; there are also extreme right terrorists like the one who assassinated Jo Cox MP and we need to ask why that is; and maybe we need to look for an explanation of terrorism at European foreign policy over the last 15 years and at the way we treat poorly educated young men of both white and middle-east origin in our societies.
Al Jazeera took much the same line but was less excited in delivering the news. I like Al Jaz: it's quite often in trouble with various Middle East and European governments and that's fine by me: it means they are doing something right.
Unless you have satellite TV, you'll never know there is an alternative view of the news. Newspapers are still important in the UK and 33 of the 35 national newspapers are owned by right wing billionaires. The 'national news services' (meaning UK telly channels - except C4) have such a twisted view of the UK, it's like they think there's some sort of weird wasteland north of Watford Gap and never venture there. If you've seen the wonderful Terry Gilliam movie Brazil, you'll know just what I mean.
But none of this means a damn thing to the people in hospital in London right now, or to the families about to get devastating news or to the emergency services trying to save people's lives through a long, awful night.
But honestly, when this is over, we need to look for a solution.
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