Keith Melville

Even though voting has opened for our general election I am not writing this to score political points; I just want to convey a weird, a really weird and somewhat funny experience in my working life as a Beacon reporter years ago.

It must have been in the early 1990s when the Beacon fire alarm blared for no apparent reason.

Distracted from my work and annoyed at the interruption, I sat there in front of my ancient Imperial typewriter alone in the reporters’ room before checking out the noise.

In those days the Beacon was in The Strand East on two floors and could only be described as Dickensian by age and facilities, and also by editorial management style, which was not unusual at the time.

From my desk above the ground floor, I soon discovered the door to the toilet down the hallway was locked. I banged on the door declaring the fire alarm had sounded. No response. Apart from that nothing else was out of the norm.

In my search for the cause of the alarm, which had since been turned off, I ran downstairs to find the editor, Mike Allen and the editorial team, busy putting the newspaper to bed for publication the next day.

He disliked interruptions so I left them to their work.

Upstairs, I found the toilet door still locked. I returned to my desk, puzzled, but a few moments later I received a frantic call from Mike, who in his own inimitable and authoritarian manner ordered me “to get them out of here”. He slammed down the phone without explanation. Then I heard some female voices chattering away on the stairs outside the reporters’ office heading for the photography section.

I had no idea what they were doing there but all six or seven of them were clearly offended when I told them they had to leave urgently.

I could hear comments such as “how rude” as they departed just as the clanging of a fire engine was making its hasty approach.

Then in a mad rush a team of volunteer firefighters scaled the stairs, heading straight to the locked toilet where they forced open the door and extinguished the smouldering remains of a cannabis and tobacco cigarette on the toilet windowsill before departing.

No one else was present inside the toilet when the brigade arrived, but someone had obviously been there and had locked the door to smoke the joint in private before departing apparently in a hurry and somehow leaving the toilet locked from the inside in a seemingly impossible and mysterious feat.

I know who caused the bedlam. He was a new reporter, who always had the red eyes of a cannabis smoker.

He never lasted long at the Beacon, although some months later I noticed he had found himself a press job in Parliament working for a National Cabinet Minister.

He is still around today and works for a daily newspaper, and judging by his writing style his vision must have improved as well.

As for the women, they were on a guided tour of the Beacon when I expelled them without proper explanation.

The smoke from that smouldering joint had been sucked by a fan into a room on the ground floor to set off the alarm and alert others.

There, I told you I wasn’t writing this to score political points, but it would be a shame to sign off without making a small point considering much of the election campaign has been about the excesses of tax.

Always remember what the great American economist, Milton Friedman said on the subject: If you pay people not to work and tax them when they do, don’t be surprised if you get unemployment. So true.