I was attending the excellent great Ormond Street Hospital conference ‘RISKY BUSINESS‘ at the equally excellent Kings Place just by London’s Kings Cross. I parked my bike at 8.15am on a vacant hoop and went about my risky business.

When I came to leave, at 1.15pm, I found someone had parked a rather elegant Ladies bike (sit-up-and-beg style) next to mine on the same side of the hoop…alas she had put her lock through the V in my frame and I was trapped.

The Guardian newspaper is the main user of the building and the excellent Guseppe – the Italian security man – told me he knew visually who the elegant owner of the bike was…but he didn’t know her name. So I asked the desk to do a round robin email on the Guardian system to find the owner. Alas, no response, so I left empty handed.

I rang Guseppe at intervals to see if the elegant owner had materialised. Someone at work told me there is a new fangled system of bike robbery. Lash an old crate to the one you want to nick. The owner comes back, can’t move his or hers, leaves it… the robber comes back with a van and the kit… one more bike stolen. I began to panic…the bike’s new.

So come 6pm I decided to Tweet my predicament. Eat yer heart out email! TWITTER reigns. Within five minutes, another elegant soul on the guardian had seen my Tweet. ‘She’s coming down’ she announced. The elegant owner was unshackling her bike, and liberating mine, within just ten minutes of my Tweet.

Welcome to the brave new world! A sensational piece of serendipitous online research. A one off? Maybe, but I doubt it.

For those of us who intersect with the Downing Street Press Office from beyond the confines of the Westminster lobby, the revelations regarding Damian McBride came as little surprise.

Uncouth would be a kind description of the man, charmless would perhaps be more accurate. After all, he was seemingly known as Mad Dog to his friends, and McPoison to his enemies.

My own intersections with McBride, in the flesh, by text and by email, were mostly of a one way nature. He rarely replied.

In our limited correspondence he seemed to have no interest in promoting his “master’s” interest on our “outlet”, nor, so far as I am aware, on anyone else’s. McBride was one of those people you wondered about…

It was interesting to note that McBride made it to the higher reaches of the Labour party and at the right hand side of the prime minister. It was an ascent I was never able to resolve, and still cannot.

McBride’s unmasking speaks ill of the whole Westminster lobby correspondent system – a cosy club which both the Independent and the Guardian tried unsuccessfully to operate outside of.

It leads to the sustaining of special advisers, and it serves political hacks in government and beyond more generously than they would be served were there no such secret society meeting on “lobby terms” at regular intervals – about which readers, viewers and listeners are never told.

This is not to speak ill of my own colleagues or the many friends I have within the system… they are prisoners of it. It is in the prime minister’s hands to end it.