TWO FACTS for you: 1) The house in which I have grown up in is to be bulldozed to make way for Heathrow Airport's expansion. 2) I missed out on Glastonbury this year.
For these two reasons I decided to head down to the Climate Camp, a temporary, sustainable settlement just north of Heathrow, made up of protesters, green peace activists, the odd mongrel dog, undercover police, and soon-to-be-homeless residents urgently familiarising themselves with the four walls of a canvas tent.
It's the closest I've ever come to running away, I thought, as I parked up in a nearby pub car park and walked over to the camp while checking my footprints for tell-tale carbon.
The road leading up to the site was blocked by police and even the ITN van with a satellite on the roof was refused entry so I decided not to bother trying my local press card.
As I stood in the rain with my comrades, news filtered through across the crackling waves of their walky talkies that riot police had entered the camp and were involved in a stand-off with protesters.
I got chatting to Dave from Leeds. He came from a politically-active family, he said. His mother used to poach sheep and feed them to the miners during the 1920 mining strikes, he said. Poached sheep? That must be a northern dish, I said.
The rain was getting heavier and while one group, led by a pale-looking man in an open-faced teddy bear balaclava, discussed the possibility of walking past the police lines, others suggested going to The King William for steak and chips.
Dave's motorised wheelchair wouldn't manage the step in the King William so I took him to The Crown and bought him half a bitter while he fumbled in his bag for his medication.
He was a maths and physics teacher in his native Leeds and when he was't teaching he was protesting. He was involved in a protest camp at Drax power station last year and clearly didn't let his emphysema or narcolepsy, as he later told me, put him off. I liked him.
By 9.30pm the blocade was still in place and Dave was worried that the rain would have made the camp too muddy for his buggy. You always need a contingency pla