BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Good morning.

Today we're on the streets of Naples, picturesque, lively, and also home to the local mafia and the flying squad on their tail. We take a dog for a walk

in Russia, a breath of fresh air for a political activist. We try going back home in Syria, not a joyous occasion, and we meet the Jews whose home is a remote area of Portugal.

First to Africa and the ancient plague which has arrived again, locusts, extraordinary but

veracious destroyers of everything green and edible. They can travel up to a hundred miles a day and eat their own body weight in vegetation every day. How to stop them? Well, the locals try yelling or blowing whistles or even firing guns at them, says Joe inward.

When does a swarm of locus become a plague? My girlfriend asked as I prepared my overnight bag.

I wasn't sure at what point the little insects technically

go biblical, but I knew we weren't quite there yet. What we were seeing was an upsurge,

although from the pictures that were emerging, desperate farmers trying to defend their crops,

Somali soldiers shooting to scare them off, I thought they'd need a miracle to save their harvests.

The question of scale was just one of many as we prepared to film the insects munching their way across East Africa. There were literally billions of them.

So I was sure it would be easy to capture them on camera.

There were reports of swarms coming in from the east, but that's also where the

jihadist group Al-Shabaab operates, so we headed north instead.

The plan was to join a helicopter surveillance team.

We imagine that we jump in, fly to a swarm first thing in the morning while they were

still asleep, and grab some lovely pictures in the golden light of the rising sun.

Simple, really?

Except that it wasn't.

You see, the locus were on the march because of the torrential rains that have drenched this continent for months,

and right on cue the heavens opened. The helicopter was grounded.

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