leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Three minutes after ten is the time. You are listening to James O'Brien on LBC.

This sounds a little bit odd, you know, but it's true.

Floods are one of those issues, one of those events, but

we don't like to think about too closely if we're not directly affected because they sort of

underline the vulnerability, the essential flimsyness of, I was about to say existence, but that

would sound a bit iphiluting, but of our kind of our lives. So what I've done in the past

when we've been seeing scenes such as the ones we're currently seeing in the north of England

is actually ask a question that I think when I tell you what it is, you'll go,

oh, cricky, I never thought of that.

What happens the next morning?

If you wake up tomorrow, armpit deep in floodwater, what happens?

Where do you go? How do the kids get to school? Where do you sleep? What if you haven't got family? All of these questions and more will present themselves with an urgency that's almost impossible to contemplate.

I used to say quite often that my favourite subjects, or the subjects that I feel we are most duty bound to discuss on the programme, are the ones about which you know absolutely nothing

until suddenly you need to know everything. It's a good phrase that. Care homes, I think, were the

first example of it. I remember doing phone ins on care homes without having any sense in my own life

of needing to know any of this information, doing it is, I suppose, in a form of public service

broadcasting, God forbid.

And realizing, you know, caller after caller after caller sort of describing scenarios and circumstances, which are fairly obvious, I don't need to tell you what they are,

where suddenly you need to find a care home for mum or dad or grandma.

And up until that point, you knew nothing about the sector.

Well, times that by a billion, and you get an idea of the immediacy of the impact that flooding could have upon a family.

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