Charlie Collier is having trouble talking. Each time he opens his mouth his words disappear in a chorus of car horns. It's been going on all morning, ever since he and his colleagues marched symbolically from Falkirk fire station on the stroke of 9am to form a new picket line on the forecourt.
"Frustration, anger, confusion," shouts Mr Collier above the cacophony. "Here we are again and we didn't need to be. I went to bed thinking there would maybe be a deal but I wake up this morning to find John Prescott can't get out of his bed to make it happen. And now we have an eight day national fire strike and this all goes against what we are."
He glances back through the doors of the station to the row of gleaming red engines locked behind the glass. "We all want to be in there doing our jobs. The last thing we wanted to do was to walk out again."
Mr Collier, 48, has been fighting fires for 30 years. He doesn't know how many people he has helped; he's never thought to count. After the last stoppage he was back in the thick of it within hours; cutting victims from car wrecks; running into smoke-filled buildings when everyone else was running out.
He likes the car horns, even though they sometimes make him wince. It reminds him that some people at least are still behind the cause.
"We have had tremendous support from the public round about here. I hope most of them are; we need them behind us," he says. "It's frustrating. We're not asking for the earth, just for a fair wage and recognition for what we do. But the prime minister is not even in the country. That tells us just what the government's attitude is to this."
William Smith is frustrated as well. He is trained to fight fires but he doesn't think people appreciate his skills.
At the last strike the petty officer from the Faslane naval base was worried the press would follow his green goddess from the Falkirk TA centre to a callout, picking flaws in its crew and equipment. "We did a really good job," he said. "The green goddesses we have are old but the equipment is more than adequate for the job.
After the first strike it was plastered all over the press that people had died over two days and how they would not if the firefighters had been working. Well, how many people died in the two days after the firefighters went back to work? I've not seen that anywhere."
Mr Smith and his colleagues have been based at the TA centre for a month, living in empty offices, training every day. Yester day, they were watching the phone in the office with the red strip of tape stuck haphazardly along the handset. If it goes off, so do they.
"We have got a job to do," says Mr Smith, 37. "We know how to do it and we have proved we can do it. You don't hear of ships catching fire and people dying. That's because we do fire exercises every day. All of us here have had a fire on a ship we have had to deal with. We know what we are doing."
Behind him, on the skyline, the chimneys of the giant Grangemouth petrochemical complex belch out flames and clouds of steam. No one wants to think what happens if there is an incident there.
There is uncertainty, too, about what might unfold over the next few hours and days; whether a deal might be struck after all.
"It's a bloody farce," says one officer. "Everybody just wants to go home."
