with James O'Brien.

Very good morning to you. It's three minutes after ten. You're listening to James O'Brien on LBC. Quite a lot to get through today. Massive crisis. I listened to the radio earlier, and just someone dropped into conversation. There's 40,000 vacancies in nursing at the moment. I was preparing to talk about that. But there's arguably an even bigger crisis in the teaching profession with 20% of teachers planning to leave within the next two years. Ho-hum, as I told you a moment ago,

I'm sure you're deeply, deeply concerned. In fact, I suspect you may not sleep tonight for fear

that I'll be late for work tomorrow. These ongoing environmental protests undertaken by the,

I think, rather excellent activists from Extinction Rebellion,

are beginning to bite.

It will make many of us angry.

I felt the first stirrings of irritation this morning

when I realised that my chauffeur-driven limousine

was likely to be delayed on its way through the

streets of the capital, but hey, I'm prepared to suffer if you are.

It's all about the planet, in it?

And I've drawn still to the tale of Shemima Begham and why, much as it sticks in our

craw, it is a matter of utterly obvious simplicity that she has to be given legal aid.

If you read The Secret Barrister's rather excellent book, out now in paperback, bestselling book, about the state of our legal system, you'll realize that a lot of stuff our forebears took for granted has been

slowly shaved away, partly as a result of utterly bogus tabloid reporting of, well, simplistic

and bogus reporting of complicated and important issues. But we digress. I'm going to begin in

Paris this morning. I'm not quite sure how. Some mornings, not very often,

I feel an over, an irresistible need to discuss certain subjects without really knowing how

they're going to lend themselves to the phone in format, as it were, or indeed from the

nature of me asking you a question and you answering it.

Can I stress from the beginning that I'm not being judgmental this morning?

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