A WEEK ago last Thursday my wife and I were on a Piccadilly Line underground train between King's Cross and Russell Square feeling decidedly uncomfortable about the commuter crush in the run-up to 9am.

But, up to then, the biggest disaster was news of a broken tap in the bathroom which flooded the kitchen below.

The fact that my youngest son went on to hold a party, when the official going underfoot could be described as "heavy", is now as legendary as me sitting next to the London Eye being told by a spotty insurance call centre worker that he had no record of our insurance extending to an emergency plumber.

It wasn't the Woolwich's finest hour.

For most of us, the inconvenience of Thursday was a stack of TV programme changes as the main news channels struggled to find coverage of events mostly taking place on the underground.

How I longed for a Bush or Blair to point his finger at the TV cameras and tell the terrorists now skulking in the shadows "we're gonna get you".

Nothing so dramatic. The signs are of a painstaking hunt for clues and another saga of lengthy legal proceedings which could last as long as Lockerbie. Perhaps that's why the rule of the gun in Iraq now, suddenly, looks far more appealing.

Having collapsed on the sofa on Thursday, after a week of building inspectors, builders and insurance updates, my domestic goddess announced: "I'm turning off that industrial dehumidifier, it's doing my head in, and I can't hear the television."

Timely then, that the subject should be Newcastle-based 24-year-old Linsey Smith who opened a new series of The Bank Of Mum And Dad (BBC2) with an announcement that she'd accumulated £33,100 of debt in about two years.

This included an £8,000 car bought by credit card. My recumbent wife was now perched on the edge of her seat as mum Jan, from Hartlepool, wept on Tyneside's Millennium Bridge as Linsey blithely added a two in front of the £9,000 that mum suspected that she owed.

And the total kept going up. Eventually, the trainee bar manager stepped back from the pledge that she'd rather go bankrupt than curb her free-spending ways.

She faces an eight year task of repaying all that goodtime mullah if she gives up smoking (not so far) and uses a bicycle for commuting rather than taxis (Newcastle in winter, hmm...).

My wife and I come from "never a borrower or a lender be" debt-fearing days of Britain's past and she regularly settles accounts massively early.

"I don't know what to say about this programme because this is just outside my experience," she said. She was back on form with Live8 (BBC1, Saturday)... "do we have to watch all of this, these stupid interviews with the stars make me ill".

And our builder, called Phil, arrived with the news that his son was one of the expectant fathers featured in Baby House (ITV1, Mon-Fri this week and next) presented by the decidedly drippy Fiona Phillips. "It's a load of rubbish really, but they're getting £5,000 for the baby and a load of baby stuff, so what the heck," said the man checking our ceiling.

Published: 09/07/2005