Crazy Street: Where the wait for the royal baby goes on

I called for a cab the other day and when the dispatcher asked my address I told her South Wharf Road, Paddington. "Oh," she said. "Crazy Street." I've heard that black cab drivers with sightseers on board now take a swing down Crazy Street. It's like the zoo, only with humans.

The various media pens on South Wharf Street are gradually getting fuller as the wait for the royal baby at the Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital goes on. And on.

More and more photographers are coming to check the ladders they left here two or three weeks ago. Some hang around for a couple of hours, but it's hot and nothing is happening.

Their presence, though, is a warning to the real diehards, the press pen pioneers, that one of these days Crazy Street really is going to go crazy.

I like to think of myself as a diehard after 10 days, but I'm not really. Eight technicians from one of the US networks are spending their 20th night in the nearby Hilton Hotel. These guys work Crazy Street in shifts, 24 hours a day.

Bored hacks can pass the time interviewing each other for those inevitable "media madness" pieces. But it's been done to death now, like the bookies stunts and the man in the Union Jack outfit.

So we tweet and blog and gossip and speculate and take silly snaps of each other. The due date is mid July, but my own oldest daughter is now 10 days overdue with her second child and everyone knows it could be another fortnight.

Songs keep coming to my mind during all this craziness. Today it's "Sloop John B" by the Beach Boys and the line "this is the worst trip I've ever been on."

Actually, that's not true. Crazy Street currently runs second to the dreadful "forward press information centre" in the Gulf War. It was not forward and the information was hopelessly put of date. On that occasion the wait for anything to happen was enacted at a makeshift desert base, less than two hours from a Hilton Hotel.

We sat there for days on end, often in gas masks and chemical warfare suits. Once in a while Saddam would lob a Scud missile in our direction. I'm sure there are those in the royal family who'd like to do the same in Crazy Street.