It’s a live piece. I try to consider him dispassionately, as any other viewer would see him; but really, does anyone view him dispassionately, when we’ve all grown up with his serious expression and dry BBC English reporting from every notable event around the globe? A tall, slim man in his fifties with a decent head of gray hair and piercing pale blue eyes. A man with authority, a man of gravitas, but not without charm—charm of the old-school variety: terribly Britishly polite. He’s not, though; not in private, with good friends, after a drink or four: then he’s scandalously, wickedly indiscreet. It’s a required characteristic of the perpetual bachelor, presumably, if dinner party invitations are going to be forthcoming after everybody else has coupled up: Oh, we must invite Jonathan, he’s always a scream.

There are other versions of him, ones that nobody sees but me. Or whoever was there before me, or whoever might come after. Perpetual bachelor: he shouldn’t be considered as such, given we’ve been together for nigh on a decade. But I know that’s how everyone thinks of him. I am presumed to be a barnacle on the hull that will at some point be scraped off, while the ship itself blithely forges on.

On-screen the oil rig burns, the fiery plume impossibly tall, the black greasy billows above it so thick they appear solid. The Icelandic volcano is not the only part of the earth making its protest through the medium of a deadly cloud.

Now Jonathan is in the picture again. He’s fielding questions from the news anchor in London, his hand straying up to his earpiece; there must be a lot of background noise. He’s doing a good job—well of course he is, he’s Jonathan Powell—and the professional part of my brain relishes the story. It’s a newshound’s dream: a complex human and environmental disaster with wide-ranging economic, political and environmental implications. I can just imagine the atmosphere in the newsroom, an atmosphere I’ve lived through so many times: so charged your skin prickles with it, like wearing a blanket of static electricity. At the beginning it felt like that for me all the time, but the human body can’t handle that level of adrenaline for a prolonged period. At some point you have to become inured. But for a story like this, nobody would be immune.

“What time is it there?” asks Carrie.

“They’re six hours behind,” I say distractedly. Jonathan has his gravest face on, laying out the facts in a final roundup. Eleven people are missing; the rig is in danger of sinking. This is the hard news dilemma: usually every great story is a terrible one, too. Eleven people: I wonder who is waiting anxiously for them. Parents, siblings, young wives? I imagine pinched faces, gray-white with worry; a snot-nosed child, crying . . .