I am working with Sally Ashton on Madrid writer Mario Crespo’s Leeds based novel, LS6. The book culminates in a cataclysmic event at the West Yorkshire Playhouse: dead, injured, all the services - fire, ambulance, police.

When I turned up to return some equipment to the Playhouse this afternoon they were all there, loads of them, along with cordon tape and those odd vehicles they roll out for special occasions, command centres, incident trucks, Simon Snorkels.

It was only from seeing clip-board types in pink high-vis vests with Umpire written on the back that I realised I wasn’t walking towards a cataclysm, but a major civil emergency training exercise along with volunteer dead and wounded. Theatre.

In the novel, it’s for real.