Channel 4 insists that I was the first woman in my field. But the only first I think I can honestly claim is having charged a dog to my expenses

This has been my last week at Westminster after 26 years, 23 of them on Channel 4 News. I am leaving early because I have rarely finished a piece more than two minutes before deadline, and I thought my colleagues, and my body, needed a break.

Now I intend to do all the things, including some rather more considered journalism, I haven't had time for. I had thought I would gradually wind down, but that was before the explosions. My instinct when anything dramatic happens is to rush to the House of Commons lobby. At the time Nigel Lawson resigned,

I was at ITN's headquarters near Oxford Street. Unable to pick up a cab, I jumped on a bus and shouted at the passengers, "Lawson's resigned!" No one seemed even faintly moved, and the bus remained firmly stuck in traffic, obliging me to run to the Commons from Trafalgar Square.

Last Thursday, parliament was very much on the periphery of events. MPs gathered in the lobby, probably even more ignorant of what was going on than the lobby hacks who were watching events unfold on television. So determined were they to look as if it was business as usual, they were in danger of looking totally irrelevant.

One Conservative asked a question about the welfare of dogs and cats; a Liberal Democrat handed out a press release about his local hospital. But the united front in the House when Charles Clarke made his statement was a necessary part of the nation's response. Like infantrymen forming a defensive square, MPs trained their fire on an enemy who might attack from any side. George Galloway's linking of the bomb attacks with Britain's support for the war on Iraq came too soon, when bodies were still being recovered.

On Monday, too, MPs were more concerned about not offending relatives, and not giving succour to the enemy, than they were with raising the kinds of questions people were asking in TV studios and newspaper columns. The Prime Minister seemed almost nonplussed by the praise heaped upon him.

Much of the week has been spent planning my leaving party, which Channel 4 and ITN are generously giving me. C4 is so used to talking about its "award-winning" news programme, that it proposed sending out invitations referring to me as an "award-winning journalist". I had to point out I hadn't won any. But, they said, you were the first in your field. I explained there had been other women around when I joined the lobby, not least Julia Langdon of the Guardian, with whom, much to our mutual irritation, I was frequently confused. The only first I think I can honestly claim is having charged a dog to my expenses. I was filming at a gypsy camp, and bought a dog in return for access. It was, of course, called Chav, and has now been rehoused rather more easily than the gypsies, who are still being pushed from one site to another.

Leaving parties require speeches, which has meant racking my brains for anecdotes that are just on the right side of good taste. One I have rejected concerns Margaret Thatcher. In the 1983 election, I got a rare interview with her. I had just come from the launch of the Labour rose, where Edna Healey had remarked that it reminded her "of nothing so much as the rose on a packet of Southalls' sanitary towels". When I was doing the two-shot after the interview (pictures of the two of us with no sound to allow quotes to be cut together) I was supposed to chat to Mrs Thatcher, so I started telling her about the rose: "Edna Healey said it was just like the one on the Southalls' packet." Her eyes froze like a woman who had never used sanitary protection. I wilted, and in future tried to stick to the weather when doing two-shots.

When I leave, I hope I will get involved in politics from the bottom up. The big campaign locally at the moment is "Save the Pewsey toilets". Kennet District Council is proposing to close all but two of its public lavatories on cost grounds. It may sound small beer, but think of old ladies who wouldn't have the nerve to go into the pub and ask to use the loo. Yet I feel one councillor went over the top when he told the local paper, "Public lavatories are the bedrock of civilisation".

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