OCCASIONALLY you’re lucky enough to be in the right place at the wrong time, or the wrong place at the right time: like being detonated out of bed on a perfectly civilised Sunday morning by the Buncefield oil depot.

Built in the Swiss-chalet style from light-coloured brick and designer cardboard, the Apsley Lock development is inclined to shift in a strong breeze anyway, so when I opened the curtains I wasn’t expecting to see Armageddon rising from the other side of town.

Without a word of exaggeration it would have looked like Dante’s Peak if there hadn’t been a tree in the way. Nonetheless I had a ringside seat to the biggest story in the world that day. It was my turn.

On with the home computer, crank up access to Local London’s news management system, stick the telephone earpiece in, and start pulling it together: words, pictures, witnesses, who is on call?… Great fun.

Local London reporter Martina Smit tends to be in the wrong place at the right time rather more often than most because she rides a BMW 650 motorbike, or at least she did before some dangerous clown knocked her off it last month and left her lying in the road.

She came to London from working the Johannesburg crime beat for Beeld, South Africa’s leading daily. “There they leave dead bodies lying for a while so you can always get good pictures,” she said at interview. So naturally she got the job.

Then came 7/7, her pictures of blood spattered walls in Tavistock Square and the eerily silent Tube stations. Parking her bike dangerously close to where the police were towing things away to blow them up for security reasons, Martina filed her copy from a pay phone when her mobile gave out.

Whenever she gets agitated her Afrikaaner accent becomes more and more pronounced, and hammering the keyboard with the phone jammed to my ear it became increasingly difficult to understand what she was saying over the traffic noise behind her. Finally she yelled, “There’s polees looking at ma bike, Phil! And they’re… Hey! No! Leave that blardy thing alone, Man!”

That was Martina’s turn. And 7/7 went on forever, qualifying in the annals of Local London news as ‘the longest day’.

Still with a broken collarbone from her bike smash Martina was not on shift last Thursday morning when the airports went ‘critical’, but I called her anyway: “Did I wake you?” Why do we always say that when someone answers the phone with a mouthful of cotton wool and their brains clearly jellied in aspic?

“It might be happening again: terror alert, planes, airports… Switch on your TV. Peter’s on his way in, Hillingdon Times is sending a photographer to Heathrow, something’s going on in High Wycombe as well but Bucks Free Press will handle that: can you pull together the words? Thirty minutes, okay? I’ll do four pars now then you take over. Hullo? Martina? Are you really awake?”

However great it is, there’s something annoying about Google News : one second you’re top of the world’s news providers, centre stage, the next second (never mind minute ) London’s news is being more prominently reported by some weekly in Idaho.

It’s all down to computers and key words, and like lies, damned lies and my ‘O’ Level results they don’t always do justice.

Local London spent last Thursday’s airport chaos being flicked in and out of the top five slots on Google News: position and prominence changing every two or three seconds in a giddying news world where if you blink you miss something.

But does this give local Londoners the voice? Is London news being reported to London people, in London, for London? I mean, Idaho where ?

Sooner or later local Londoners have got to take to the forum they want, not only to speak their minds as a disparate, coherent, unified, divided whole, but as a metropolis of people that is geographically better placed than any other news source in the world to report what’s happening in London next Sunday, or tomorrow, or today…

Local London reporters are inevitably too few to arrive often enough in the right place at the wrong time or visa versa. You can’t be lucky enough to get blown out of bed by the news every day.

Twenty-first century journalism is citizen journalism, with local Londoners reporting of themselves, by themselves, for themselves.

Sending stories, pictures, or hammering keys on The London Blog: it’s all about making your voice heard.

Of all the people to be in the right place, at the right time, with the will to speak…you’re it.

So now it’s your turn.