I feel sick. Not from the heat, not from the scale of the work and the problem we face - I feel sick because I just ate ten Mars Bars. We are having a bizarre party - the kind that only happens when you coop eight people up in a room in such bizarre circumstances and we all weird out for ten minutes.
William has been to Amman and back over night and he brought back a cool box of chocolate, English newspapers, fresh orange juice and a bunch of other stuff. You would think we had all be marooned for months on a far flung island as we all fell on the boxes, grabbing at each others bags of sweets and pulling the papers out of each others hands - a moment of pure pleasure that now has made me really pukey!!!!
William has been on a mission for us, which made the man on the receiving end feel a little pukey too. He crossed over into Jordan - yes that crazy ride again - to take our samples out of the country; for protection as well as analysis...
Our scientist who is doing the analysis was appalled when we told him what we had found and then William produced his little metal parcel full of yellow cake - he turned a little grey.
It is secure in its container - mind you that didn't stop William worrying when a Jordanian border guard hitched a lift in his car and sat on it!!!!!
Now some people might think it a little reckless to be travelling with highly radioactive material - fair question.
I'll throw a question back at you though. If we can get yellow cake over the border underneath a Jordanian border guards' bum (even if that bit was an accident) - what do you think the "steal to order" dirty bomb dealers might have been doing in the last two months?
I was interested to note (that's Irish sarcasm for are you mad - how can you possibly say that...by the way) the IAEA still saying they have accounted for most of the missing material. Now we make a pretty good team - all the right people, the right expertise and a big dollop of Irish luck - but even I am not so lucky (or rather, unlucky in this case) to have stumbled across the only bits the IAEA have missed.
What does accounted for mean anyway? So you know where it is - it's in that house, on that field, near that school, over that border - therefore we've accounted for it. Tell us where it is - no actually scrap that - tell the communities where it is. Force the issue, get a clean up going, don't account for it - decontaminate it.