I can see its twinkling red lights from my bedroom window in north London, as it nears completion. By day I glimpse it from my bike sometimes on the skyline, sometimes in the middle distance.

Yesterday I happened much closer to the Shard – so close that I could feel the evolving cold wind tunnel that seems to be establishing in streets it overhangs.

From a distance the Shard is graceful, inflicting a kind of scale on everything that went before – from the BT Tower, to the Gherkin. But close up, as the sheath of glass spikes the freezing fog above, the emphasis is on the Shard below the waist.

From ground level, it is far from a thing of beauty. Fat billowing glass skirts mount the sides of the building, presumably rooting the great thing deep into the ground. It is so fat that it appears to occupy every square inch of land about it, butting hard on to buildings and streets.

Not an area of outstanding beauty I’ll confess, but an area nonetheless. And who can mourn the invasion of the erstwhile dominance of neighbouring Guys Hospital tower?

Is the trade off for distant grace, such a base? From the very bottom looking up, the Shard conjures the view of a three-year-old child standing outside a supermarket looking up fat ladies dresses as they put their trolleys back. Eventually there’s a rather beautiful head far above – but the in-between could do better!

And that implies no disrespect to fat ladies: from Botticelli to Stanley Spencer and Beryl Cooke, the beauty of the fat lady has been immortalised in art. But I’m not sure any artist will have much joy with the Shard’s bottom.

It’s – ugh, how shall I put it? Not as beautiful as its top.

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Dateline Brussels: Strip out the British veto on a new full EU Treaty, and you are left with what appears to have been a pretty successful night of negotiations here. That is, if success is measured in terms of a middle to long- term commitment to secure and enhance the euro and the eurozone itself.

From the vantage point of my 11^th floor hotel room window I was able to gaze down on what I estimate to be the seventh floor in the commission building in which the eurocrats toiled away during the night hours – they were clustered in shirt and blouse sleeves at round tables, six or seven to a table. At times somnolent, at other moments animated, as the discussions behind closed doors ebbed and flowed.

At 5am David Cameron did not disguise the progress toward saving the euro. His emphasis on his own veto did not obscure the reality that 17 euro members plus some half a dozen aspirant members have agreed a much tighter fiscal regime, trading significant areas of sovereignty to achieve it. They also agreed an immediate infusion of some €200bn for short-term bailouts.

That UK veto is designed to protect the huge financial service industry centred in the City of London – a sector that accounts for a significant proportion of UK GDP. The very sector that precipitated the 2008 crisis has not however derailed attempts to save the euro. Britain’s withdrawal from the process may indeed render it easier, because without having to battle for a new EU wide treaty (process that could have taken years) a much speedier solution can be triggered.

The sense here is that Britain has finally left the top table, that a two-speed Europe  is under way – the UK, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Sweden in Division Two, the rest in Division One – or trying to get into it.

From the British perspective, Europe is likely now to become a far bigger issue. No one knows how damaging isolation may prove. Nor how advantageous.

Politically, euro-sceptics may sense the whiff of victory in their nostrils. My own idiosyncratic sense is that there could be a backlash particularly from new businesses, big businesses and the younger generation who, in a globalise world, may wish to explore the option of belonging to a wider, deeper, more fiscally responsible union, who knows.

But looking at David Cameron this morning, sitting 10ft from him, I wondered how comfortable he felt in his newly defined position.

Once or twice in a reporting lifetime, a journalist is allowed by events to participate in a project that can affect history. The film I have narrated tonight on Channel 4 – Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields – airs at 11.05 pm. It is a painful, and complex team achievement in which we have pieced together an account of what happened in the closing weeks of Sri Lanka’s civil war.

Bluntly, our evidence shows how Tamil civilians were corralled into one ever diminishing piece of land and systematically shelled and bombed by government forces. Some of the targets were medical facilities emblazoned with the internationally recognised Red Cross.

The United Nations believes at least 40,000 civilians were massacred in this process. Our evidence of how it was done comes in the form of mobile phone footage, Tamil and government film footage, and mobile phone “trophy footage” in which soldiers filmed themselves abusing and executing Tamils who had either surrendered or been captured.

War crimes were committed on both sides in what was a barbarous conflict. But the Government action that we report tonight transcends anything seen during this phase of the civil conflict.

It is a harrowing and difficult film to watch. But it represents not only the evidence required to convict, but a first ever testament in the digital age to the dawning truth that in this age it is becoming close to impossible for warring forces to cover up what they have done.

The United Nations own panel of inquiry is already satisfied that a war crime occurred on the scale and of the nature that we report tonight. Whether those responsible are brought to trial at the International Criminal Court, or at the Hague will in part depend upon the pressure from those who see this film upon their own politicians to support the ringing for charges.

Channel 4 is lifting its normal commercial access restrictions to allow the film to be freely seen by anyone anywhere in the world. Additionally, it is bound to go viral via Youtube.

This is not my normal kind of Snowblog. I end by asking you to watch this film. It could well prove a kind of a watershed, a moment when humanity, confronted with the evidence, cries ‘no more’. In our century of war – as the 21st Century is already beginning to feel – this could provide a moment when the perpetrators of war crimes meet the law courtesy of global disgust and pressure.

You will see that the film had to be, as it is, horrifically true to the facts of what happened. I hope you will spare 50 minutes tonight, it could be that it will make a difference.

@jonsnowc4

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields will be available to watch on 4oD as soon as possible after broadcast. Channel 4 News will also be broadcasting a preview of the film during tonight’s news broadcast.

Two nights ago I was running from work to a good-bye party for a close work colleague.

He had a penchant for French striped matelot tops. So having torn my shirt off and put on my unaccustomed yachting attire, I removed the cufflinks from the shirt and put them in my pocket, so that the shirt would be ready for the laundry in the shop next door in the morning.

My cufflinks are special to me. They are gold, simple, and almost the only possession I have that my father owned. I have worn them every time I have ever presented Channel 4 News from our studio (I tend not to wear them “in the field” for fear of losing them).

As I put them in my pocket I had the passing thought that doing so, loose, was risky.

I went out to my bike to cycle to the party and found I had a puncture. So I made my way by cab. Half way through the evening I became aware that one of my precious cufflinks was missing. There was only one in my pocket.

Scrambling around like a baboon I searched the small space in which I had been sitting, and found nothing. I told the publican of my loss and began to adjust to the idea that this unbroken link with my dad was finally finished.

Having blogged, the following morning I left home five minutes late for work and suddenly remembered, I had no bike. I was going to miss our vital 9.30am editorial meeting. There were no cabs and I ran to the tube station.

I have almost never been to work any other way than on a bike. I was amazed how fast I reached Euston…almost beating my biking commute. I ran up the escalator – wearing my one cufflink – having buttoned the other cuff. I reached the concourse, and trying to make up time, made for the cab rank.

As I descended the fixed stairway to the cabs, a gold cufflink fell at my left foot. There it was, my dad’s simple gold oval cufflink.

A Ghanaian parent at the school where he taught had had it made for him from his country’s gold. I unbuttoned the cuff and was suddenly restored for normal duty.

Where had it been?

I had scoured my pockets – the little ticket cups in the side pockets – the lot. It wasn’t in any of them. I had no trouser turn-ups, the shirt was clean. Had it been in some fold? Who knows.

But if I hadn’t had the puncture, it would assuredly fallen unseen in the road as I pedalled. And if it had fallen as I ran up the Euston escalators, I would never have seen it when it fell.

How was it that it had appeared on the one deserted stairway, when I happened to be going at a pedestrian pace, and happened to be looking down?

A small and ridiculous thing, a passing event, and yet this tiny artefact has been structural in my anchoring of well over 5,000 editions of Channel 4 News. Lucky boy!

Something refreshing at 7pm tonight. A refreshed, brighter, lighter, clearer, Channel 4 News!

New graphics, better lighting, greater clarity in how the programme works and a new news summary at 7.30pm.

Two news digests delivered by the second presenter, tonight Samira Ahmed.

The first digest centres on home and national news – the key news developments from the UK and around the world – this will run at 7.20pm or thereabouts.

The second digest – business, arts, sport, science and technology runs at 7.40pm. Snomo washes whiter at seven on four! Be there or be a Square Deal!

Block yer ears. Shut yer eyes. Krishnan and I and our able friend Mara Carlyle, are in preparation for tonight’s Newsroom’s Got Talent competition (no danger of any of us winning – we’re just ensuring that we can actually appear at all at Vinopolis in the Borough Market).

It’s a contest between the BBC, Sky, al-Jazeera, ITV, Channel 4 and Uncle Tom Cobbley, in which every one of us is going to make an idiot of ourselves – wait till you see my wig! All in the cause of Leonard Cheshire Homes and Helen House Hospice.

There will be video of the performance on our website, come Friday. Beyond what you see, we’ll be performing with our band, Fourplay.

Do you think they’ll catch on?

I was intrigued to hear BBC Radio News this morning using its own airwaves to “report” its decision to supply video content to a number of newspapers for free.

Not a corporate announcement, of course, but a news story of sufficient importance to warrant its place midway through the main bulletin during the peak period of listening on Radio Four’s Today programme.

This is a service which is currently undertaken on a commercial basis by ITN (which makes Channel 4 News). Good old BBC, you may very well say, for making a similar service freely available to the newspaper groups which have been increasingly vociferous critics of its online expansionism.

In the same spirit of fair and impartial reporting that was in evidence in the BBC’s reporting of this news this morning, it’s worth posing a number of questions the BBC may wish to address.

1. Is it a good use of licence-fee-payers money to supply a service for free that newspapers are happy to pay for?

2. Why should the licence-fee-payer then, by implication, subsidise a commercial news outlet?

3. Why should licence-fee money be used to undercut and thereby undermine the viability of a commercial rival?

4. Does this activity increase or reduce the diversity of digital/video news provision in the UK?

5. Given all the above, what exactly is the BBC for, and whose decision was it that the information above should be presented as a BBC Radio news item?

Answers on a post card please.

PS I have the obvious interest to declare: I work in the private sector in direct competition to the BBC making programmes for ITN, which some might feel disqualifies me from reporting on this issue, but I’m not sure that that neutralises my capacity to ask the above questions.

I appeared on court two at Wimbledon on Friday – the show court where the likes of Roddick, Federer, and Murray gave exhibition warm ups during the championships this year.

A new court surrounded by 4,000 seats, every one of which was empty.

I had bid for the game at a charity auction, a game with a prestigious and well known tennis aficionado, followed by lunch in the club house. It was a doubles match.

Modesty does not prevent me after two sets from describing myself as one of the few British male tennis players who can boast that he is “undefeated at Wimbledon”.

But there is something about going through the paces of the great within a week of their doing so themselves. Everywhere you tread, you feel that some great tennis shoe has preceded you. Even in the men’s showers I learned that Federer always uses the same cubicle.

So of course, given that there were a dozen to choose from, I chose his and wondered if I had been the first to use the shower gel bottle since he did.

It sort of reminds me of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where the “disciples” follow a shoe dropped by the “messiah” – except that in my case it was a shower gel bottle.

The staff sell off the men’s tennis shoes deployed in the championship – endless pairs of them. But they are grass court shoes, and I have never played on grass until this momentous day and never expect to again, so I eschewed the chance.

Anyway, curiously, I drew the line at interchangeable athletes foot.

My next brush with greatness comes this week on Tuesday. And I mean brush. Channel 4 incredibly generously commissioned the artist John Keane to paint my portrait following twenty uninterrupted years “doing” Channel 4 news.

He’s going to show it to me on Tuesday morning for the first time. I mean supposing it’s “not me”… he’s so good I doubt that will be the case, but there is something odd about the prospect of gazing at someone else’s idea of me.

Mind you, it would be easier if I had my own idea of me. I must work on that – now where are my brushes – other than those with greatness?

Rare sighting today – me and my mentor in the Channel 4 News studio. In the 20 years I’ve been doing this programme Peter Snow has never stepped this way.

It was nepotism that got me into this business and it looks like nepotism will get me out again. He could take over tonight.

Actually he was in the building for ITV making a programme on the 40th anniversary of men landing on the moon – he wasn’t one of them…