http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mjr9v

One of my delights over the past few years has been following the so-called 'children of the Olympic bid'. If you've missed it let me fill you in.

These are the youngsters who back in 2005 played a key but little known role in snatching the games for London from under the Parisian nose. Aged between twelve and sixteen at the time, they were selected from east end schools to demonstrate the diversity that London would bring to the games.

Up on stage, as Sebastian Coe put the London case to the International Olympic Committee. Their contrast with 'the suits' that the other cities had on show might just have made all the difference.

I was in Singapore at the time, but I have to admit, it was my producer who cooked up the idea with our commissioning editor at Radio 4 that we should follow these youngsters all the way through to the games themselves and see how their lives were shaped by the event they'd done so much to bring about.

It's been a joy! The first in the current series went out last Monday. We've spent a good deal of this week editing and scripting the second programme.

The great thing about these youngsters is that they have been so welcoming, so frank, so un-phased by having microphones thrust in front of them. There's a presumption that teenagers between about thirteen and seventeen are loathe to utter more than a monosyllable, but nothing could have been further from the truth with this group.

They've welcomed me into their homes, let me watch at close quarters their disasters, sporting and otherwise, and then politely answered questions about them! Talked about their love lives, their beliefs, their ambitions, without a hint of defensiveness. None of this "lessons will have been learned from this". When things go well for them, they share their uninhibited delight; when they screw up, they tell you what went wrong! Anyone with a jaundiced view of today's younger generation should listen to them; they could learn a lot!

You and Yours has also thrown up two particular delights for me this week: first of all my guest on Monday was Margaret Mountford, the businesswoman who has become something of a heroine to viewers of the BBC's 'Apprentice' for her withering look when dismissing the antics of Lord Sugar's most excruciating job applicants.

The You and Yours team have had quite a lot of fun trying to explain to me what a 'withering' look is; one of the great advantages to having been blind from birth, is that withering looks can be safely ignored!

I think Margaret must have got most of her withering looks out of the way while she and the producer negotiated over what she would, and wouldn't answer questions on!

By the time she got to me, she was all smiles (one of the joys of being a presenter; we're a cosseted bunch). She was only too happy to talk about women in the city, the fact that a lot of people came on The Apprentice just to secure a career in television, and even what she thought of a man whose nose was ensured for five million pounds, because it was so good at grading cheese.

But an even higher point than that was my trip on one of the first Greyhound buses to make a scheduled journey in Britain, from Southampton to London.

The iconic American company (actually now British-owned) reckons it can make a go of it here, but we probably haven't helped! And it was all going so well: barrelling up the motorway, Managing Director giving me his pitch, American studies academic waxing lyrical about the music the Greyhound had inspired! In fact, my worry was that this could all turn into far too much of a puff for the company!

I needn't have worried: somewhere near Windlesham in Surrey, so far not a subject of popular song, a keening, whining sound impinged on my interviewing. It quickly became apparent that we were losing power: Soon, with a nifty bit of piloting, the driver slid us to a halt on the hard shoulder! We'd broken down! It's the moment a company dreads

I have to be fair; they took it on the chin, fronted up for the inevitable interview, and summoned taxis to take everyone on to their final destinations. In fact, judging by the response to our programme, its probably done them less harm than they think; but, given that one of their great selling-points was tickets for a pound, I did rather treasure the pay-off: the lady who phoned her son to tell him what had happened, only to receive back this text: "you get what you pay for, mother".

• Series four of Children of the Olympic bid is on-air now.
• The picture shows Ashley Mitchell whose 'light-touch organisational unorthodoxy' features in episode two of Children of the Olympic bid.
• Peter's Greyhound Bus item was on Friday's You and Yours and Margaret Mountford's on last Monday's.

Pitot tubes. Until recently I had never heard of them. But as we headed from Calgary to Toronto on an Airbus I wondered if they were icing up as the outside temperature hit minus 40 - that low, C or F is the same.

Iced up pitot tubes feeding the wrong information to the onboard computer are the leading explanation for why the Airbus A330 on flight AF447 plunged into the Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Paris on 1 June. The false readings confused the computer which mishandled the plane and passed control to the humans. They could not save the aircraft so close to its tolerances in turbulent storms above the Equator. Airbus has now advised upgrading all pitot tubes even though it insists there was nothing wrong with them.

Until then I had taken comfort from the fact that modern jetliners are flown by computer. Even the pilots admit it. Two weeks earlier as we approached Toronto from London the First Officer talked us through the weather and the time at our destination, then added 'we will shortly begin our descent into Toronto in about, ooh, five minutes the computer says.' Relax, First Officer, we'll be down before the Captain has finished his Sudoku.

So I kept a look out for ice on the sharp bits of our Airbus 320-1 as we sped away from Canada's West.

Ah the West! We had said goodbye to the Rockies the day before, driving East on the trans-Canada Highway (two lanes and warnings of elk crossing though we saw none). We over-nighted in Calgary, a city of a million folk and, gosh, a hundred years old or more. It turned out to be a weird place with little to see - and less on Mondays as the Art Gallery is closed. But we stumbled upon a secret none of the guidebooks mentions. Calgary has the best restaurants and bars in Canada. We had struggled to find either so far. But Calgary's 8th Ave SW has a string of them.

Lunch was an Atlantic burger (a wonderful Canadian invention for us semi-veggies which wraps a bap round a North Atlantic salmon fillet) with chips to die for and a light Caesar salad in the Trib Steakhouse. The local house wine, carefully measured in ounces and served in very large glasses, was fruity and rich.

Then to the museum which filled half the afternoon. Not least because the official panels explaining the exhibits, which took us back through a hundred years of the West, were paralleled with alternatives from the point of view of the Aboriginal peoples (as the First Nations or Native Americans now want to be known). Reading them thoroughly was my expiation as a visitor from the nation which had stolen their country.

A short walk to the Bow River, the rapids and canyons we had marvelled at in the West now calmed into a placid highway for timber. Then two beers at the Barley Mill Eatery and Pub, converted from the Calgary Water Power Mill and the wooden office of the Eau Claire and Bow River Lumber Company. More walking and then the search for dinner took us back to 8th Ave SW where we happened on the Mango Shiva. The food was perhaps the best Indian food we had ever eaten and the thin, crisp, buttery Nan bread certainly so.

Why, I asked our server Sharyse, were there so many good bars and restaurants in Calgary? A pause. 'Our demographic is, well, we have a lot of drinkers.' Her voice went up at the end in the rising inflection that nowadays adds emphasis to a statement. And it sits on huge oil and gas reserves. 'It's a very wealthy Province' she added.

The flight from Calgary to Toronto was the day before the flight from Toronto back to London and counted as the journey home. So my thoughts were allowed at last to turn away from waterfalls and glaciers and lakes and mountains and the complete absence of bears to money and the day job. There was plenty of time. What was scheduled to be a three and a half hour flight began with nearly half that rolling round the tarmac at Calgary airport. Problems with the cabin lighting would have left the toilets dark and several soft resets by the crew failed to cure the problem. We went back to the pier and took on a maintenance engineer whose orange jacket brought the lights back to life.

The young man next to me with blond hair, frayed jeans and walking boots, who was already so late he would miss his connecting flight, cheered himself up by reading the death notices in the Calgary Herald. I spent the time absorbing the business sections of the newspapers and magazines. In the press there was a long debate over whether the regulation of financial services should be principles-based (treat customers fairly) or rules-based (do this, don't do that).

Canada is moving to the former just as the UK is moving away from it to the latter. A Ponzi fraud was revealed, smaller than Madoff (of course) but just as devastating for its hundred or so victims. Controversy raged over the disposal of the bankrupt telecoms company Nortel and who bid what for it, when and to whom.

Half way through the flight the near-bankrupt Air Canada, which charged a hefty fare for the flight, now made us pay again for less-edible-than-usual cold snacks. No-frills service at flag carrier prices. It could be a slogan.

I moved on to pages about the Canadian pension crisis. Salary-related schemes closing, some being dumped (with no protection scheme in place) and Canadians being accused of spending too much and saving too little for too long. I could have been home already. That was followed by an analysis of why fund managers in the large public sector schemes had made such big losses on the hundreds of billions of Canadian dollars entrusted to them. The three largest lost 19% or C$72 billion off their C$385 billion assets in the last year because their active managers prefer to put the money at risk in shares rather than keep it in safer bonds.

Defending this approach Jim Leech, the CEO of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan which lost C$20 billion, said 'The fact of the matter is we have to take on risk to meet our pension promise.' Oh Jim! If taking a risk guaranteed those extra returns you need so badly it wouldn't be a risk would it? The risk is you may lose another C$20 billion. Perhaps Toronto teacher Kelly Alles should be put in charge. 'A high return is great' she told Canadian Business 'but when it comes right down to it I'd rather have a guaranteed lower return'.

And before I knew it we were landing at Toronto. Another journey survived. Only six more hours on the flight to London to watch out for ice on those pitot tubes.

• Part three of Moneybox's Coping with Recession series is on air tomorrow at 1200.
• Subscribe to Paul Lewis's Moneybox newsletter.
• The picture, Calgary Suburban, is by Evan Leeson and is used under licence.

There are many advantages to working in August.

True, while many of our colleagues (and listeners) are battling with dilemmas like "white or red?", "pool or beach?" and "if I eat anything else for breakfast, will I still be able to get into my swimsuit?", I am trawling through websites, specialist journals and my contacts (those who are left at work, anyway) to see what stories they may have that we can get on air.

But while London can be, like any big conurbation, rather oppressive in hazy, sticky summer days, you can at least get a seat on the train, the queue for coffee is mercifully short, and anything story you turn your hand to will have an excellent chance of getting on.

I've been a broadcast journalist for twenty years now, and every year it's the same. There is often, sadly, one overwhelming story that happens in August - the death of the Princess of Wales, or the murder or the two little girls from Soham (both of which I covered).

But lower down the running order, there's an interesting shift in editorial standards that takes place at about the end of July. A gradual descent downwards, hurtling towards the bottom of the barrel at about this point in the summer. Part of the job of a specialist correspondent is to advise the outlets we serve about the merits of a story. But no-one wants to hear "we've done it before" at this time of year - there are still hours of airtime to fill, and not a lot with which to fill it.

But if you manage to dodge the pleading emails from output editors, August can be a fantastic time to prepare for the big stories later in the year. So much of modern day journalism can feel like a bit of a hamster wheel. Within a day you must take calls and read emails from contacts, mobilise resources, book crews, check equipment (when I do radio slots for the Today programme it's me and a satellite dish, no back up, so it's vital to make sure it's working before you leave), talk to editors, and research and turn around a story at lightning speed. So the chance to lift your gaze towards the horizon at quiet times is enormously helpful.

Yesterday, I and producer Nora Dennehy took a trip up to Sandy in Bedfordshire, to the headquarters of the RSPB, to talk to their experts about illegal bird hunting, here and in the EU, and about the effectiveness - or lack of it - of the European legislation designed to stop the practise.

Much of our planning time is now being devoted to a big UN meeting in December in Copenhagen, at which - it's hoped - there will be a global deal to reduce in the future the carbon dioxide emissions that the vast majority of scientists believe are causing climate change.

My big concern is how we are going to cover a story that involves lots of people talking impenetrably to each other in a large conference hall, and cover it in a way that makes it relevant to our listeners, explains what is going on and considers the difference it could make to us all. Already there are some very highly placed people I've been talking to who think such a deal is too much to ask in the time available - so we already have to ask the question: what happens then?

One of our ideas it to take a van that runs on chip fat around the UK to visit some low-carbon projects and schemes that are actually up and running. It's obviously a big commitment, financially and logistically, for the BBC, so we've been talking this week within the department about how viable it would be.

But before I think about covering talks designed to save the planet, I need to check out a story about a UK-wide early conker harvest, and conker-killing beetles that seem to be travelling by car. August may always be quiet, but the variety of stories that cross your desk as environment correspondent never ceases to surprise me!

Sarah Mukherjee is BBC environment correspondent.

• Picture of a conker by Nick Thompson. Used under licence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qyyb

Editor's note: Quentin sent me this update to his blog post this morning - SB.

Look, the thing about blogs is they're the almost unedited brain-to-webpage outpourings of whoever writes them and although I thought "Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan" which is one of the most fun in the series, unfortunately I typed an extra "I" which made it Star Trek III which, as any fule know, is pretty rubbish. My error was not noticed until blog-readers started pointing it out. I am suffused with shame..."

Now read on:

Swine flu has arrived in Dubrovnik. Two passengers on a cruise ship are showing symptoms. So how should the authorities respond? The press - including me - are summoned to a large meeting to hear what's been decided: 30,000 face masks will be made available (Dubrovnik has a population of only around 40,000); curfew will be enforced; all gatherings including football matches to mass are cancelled. Although not - as I point out through barely-suppressed laughter - this one. Clearly the press are expendable.

As you might have guessed - this was an exercise (it worked as a trick opening for Star Trek III so I thought it was worth trying for a Radio 4 blog post). The bad news was that I was watching scientists from across Europe make a right pig's ear out of trying to deal with a simulated swine flu scenario, suggesting a strategy that would have turned a small-scale problem into a full blown panic.

The good news was that this was taking place in the real Dubrovnik, a stunningly beautiful city I'd last been in before the 1991 siege and which is now back looking better than ever. I'm mentioning this not only because I've hugely enjoyed being at these science communication workshops in Croatia attempting to explain the workings of the media, but because I think some Radio 4 listeners imagine that for once-a-week programmes like mine, presenters are kept in a freezer between shows, thawed out just before transmission and returned there as soon as we are off air.

Material World takes up roughly half my week - preparing, researching, scripting and coming up with puns most but not all of which never get past my producer. The rest of the time I'm usually running around between conferences, other (lesser) programmes and the odd bit of more exotic work like these Dubrovnik workshops.

This was something aimed at senior figures who were supposedly already fairly media-savvy. Many were - but what I found alarming was how there remain some people high-up in science and science policy who are adamantly antediluvian in their thinking that it's entirely the public's own fault if they don't understand scientific issues or can't work out what a scientist is waffling on about. During our mock press conference on the swine flu outbreak one of them protested that "this isn't about science communication, this is about thinking on your feet" - as if helping science reach people doesn't involve responding to people and situations.

This is something which used to be a minor passion and that I'm now - including right now - at the risk of becoming a major bore about: I fervently believe that science shapes all our lives, that everyone has the right to at least a basic grasp of how, and that if you can help people past their prejudices that science is boring and/or incomprehensible, there's myriad fascinating and life-enhancing stories to tell. So it really gets my goat and other metaphorical livestock when I run into those - like one or two of the scientists in Dubrovnik - who blame the media, the public and everyone but themselves for a lack of wider scientific appreciation.

As I said - I can bore about this at length, so best leave it there even though this has been a big part of my week, like it is most weeks. That aside - apart from the continuing strange sensation of being a Manchester City supporter on the edge of a new season where the mountain of cash is overshadowed only by the mountain of expectations - I'm in recovery from 6 weeks of the 'visualisation' of Material World.

In case you missed it - and the vast majority did because it's a radio programme usually listened to via radios - this was a pilot scheme to give added visual content to for anyone hearing us live via their computer. Some people loved it, some hated it, and some liked it but found it got in the way of all the other things they usually do while hearing us live via their computer. That mixed response aside, the main focus seemed to be my physical appearance. There was a lot of guidance on my terrible posture, comments pro and anti my lively gesticulations (I wave my hands more when broadcasting than in real life, discuss), and - despite having my photo on the website - widespread disappointment at what I look like. My favourite was the backhanded compliment that came in during the final week of visualisation: "Quentin's not at all like I imagined. Great voice though".

Quentin Cooper is presenter of Material World

• The next edition of Material World is on Radio 4 at 1630 tomorrow. It's a live programme. The programme archive is here and the podcast is here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006s609

It is 21 years this summer since I started working on In Business, thanks to a sudden crisis. The programme's previous presenter had been tempted to a more lucrative job in television, and the vital deadline of the Radio Times billing was looming. That was when we decided what ought to be in the programme, and who the presenter would be. And though the presenter has stuck, this is still a familiar deadline, I'm afraid.

In Business had started some time before, in the 1970s, at a time when business got short shrift from BBC News. The powers that be must have thought it too boring, too specialist, too incomprehensible for a general audience.

Economics coverage was mostly restricted to a canter round the monthly economic indicators and a routine daily mention of the ups and downs of share prices as indicated by the Financial Times Index.

Business was a distant world. Radio 4 had woken up to the fascinating intricacies of the financial markets in 1971, when a long postal workers strike badly affected the City of London. The deputy editor of the World Tonight, Vincent Duggleby, was alerted to this, commissioned a piece on it, and very soon after that the Financial World Tonight was born as a separate programme, with Vincent at the helm.

In Business came a bit later; the first series was commissioned by Radio 4 after BBC governors were badgered at a 'Meet the BBC' meeting to recognise that there was a lot more to business than the City. That has turned out to be true.

Nevertheless, despite the explosion of business broadcasting in the past 20 years led by the American networks and then taken up round the world, it is still those perpetual motion machines the financial markets that get the most attention, in minute detail.

Leaving In Business (and its sister programme Global Business on the World Service) ample room to pursue some of the longer term trends. In particular, that means addressing the endless story of change: high technology crashing into the established way of doing things in companies, industries, countries, over and over again.

It's strange but true that the new millennium in 2000 really did seem to usher in a whole new world of business activity, reasserting the significance of the dot-com bubble even after it burst so apparently definitively the same year.

And organisations are still busy learning how to cope with the new wired-up interconnected, interactive world... look at the confusion in the global media industry at the moment if you think the implications of the Internet are now out in the open.

But it may go deeper than mere business models, such as shifting retailing to the web, or not.

Some 10 years ago the great management thinker the late Peter Drucker told me that he did not think that the computer had yet begun to effect the way organisations were managed. At the time, it seemed to be a crazy remark, but thinking about it afterwards it made more and more sense.

Henry Ford transformed industry after industry with his adoption of the production line in Detroit 100 years ago. Theoretically, the interactive information generated by the computer network should be having just as much disruptive impact on business now as Ford had then.

But few pre-existing companies seem to have changed their shape, size or business model to reflect what they now know about the clients and customers.

The mass production corporation tells itself it is making things its customers want to buy, and giving them a choice. But big companies seem to erect walls around themselves to keep the customer at bay. They commission market research rather than themselves go out and ask questions, and they mainly want customers who want to buy the things they make, not the other way round.

Inside the company all is ordered and predicable, punctuated by meetings and lunches and access to the company car parking space. Outside, in the real world, there is fearful chaos.

Big companies seem scared of the individuality of the people in the market place. They long to bring order and branding and simplicity to the disorder of real life.

It is something you see vividly in India at the moment, where the country's 12-million roadside hawkers and tiny corner shops are fighting to prevent the spread of the big corporate supermarkets.

Company Man and Company Woman see chaos on the street and in the bazaars of India, when what I see is huge choice and enormous convenience... backed by a remarkably efficient supply chain getting produce from the wholesale markets to the streets. Choice and convenience now under threat.

Business people get business qualifications that give them the tools to bring what they think is order to the chaos of the real world, in the same way that the whiz kids in the financial markets thought they had packaged up sub prime risk so that it wasn't risky any more.

The 21st century post-Ford lesson that business may have to learn is that the real world is full of millions of individuals with individual needs who want their individuality respected and served. The network computer makes this sort of intimacy possible, if companies were to learn how to use it to craft the mass market products for a clamour of different preferences.

Providing goods and services in this way was not possible when I started doing In Business 21 years ago. Perhaps we ought to make a programme about it. Perhaps that's what we are doing.

Peter Day is presenter of In Business

• This week's In Business, Learning Curve, is about training in the Internet era and is on Radio 4 at 2030 tonight.
• I took some photographs in the offices of Radio Current Affairs in White City - the department that produces Moneybox, Analysis, More or Less and In Business.
• Peter Day remembers Peter Drucker on his death in 2005.
• The In Business archive is one of the most comprehensive at the BBC. You can listen to programmes going back to 2002.
• Peter Day's World of Business podcast combines In Business and his 52 weeks-per-year World Service programme Global Business.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/ffa/2009/introduction/

Lunch yesterday at one of London's poshest restaurants - not, as many people think, what I normally spend my life doing, but a chance for me to eavesdrop on a meeting about the future of Slow Food UK. In Italy Slow Food is a powerful political force, in the UK it's been a lot less than that which has greatly aggravated SF's founder Carlo Petrini. The result is UK Slow Food has a new chief exec, American-Italian dynamo Catherine Gazzoli, hot from the UN, ready to do some shaking up and convince us class-ridden, good-food-wary Brits that food matters. I think Catherine could easily outperform Tony Blair in the Middle East, but changing the food culture of the British Isles is an altogether harder task.

Lots of compliments at the meeting about our Food & Film programme two Sundays ago. The food world is a bit like the entertainment industry - you were wonderful darling - so I don't take compliments too seriously, but that was a programme I'm particularly proud to have presented. One of the Food Programme's brilliant producers understood that it would cast a new light on our food system if we looked at it just through the eyes of film makers, both here and abroad. We're living through a golden age of documentary making - documentaries that are being watched in cinemas, village and church halls all over the world (while fewer and fewer are appearing on our television screens. Something wrong somewhere).

Making the programme I interviewed Nick Francis, who with his brother Marc directed Black Gold, a documentary about the coffee business. I met them first with producer Rebecca Moore when The Food Programme went to Cancun to cover the World Trade Organisation meeting. Nick and Marc were there following the coffee story, documenting the relationship between developing countries and global decision-making on "free trade". The Cancun scenes in Black Gold are some of the most powerful in the whole film. Since the film was released in 2007 the issues it highlighted have taken over the brothers' lives.

And the film has been screened all over Africa and the Americas, spelling out for all to see a world where a cappuccino costs around £2.50 but the Ethiopian farmer who produced the beans - generally agreed to be the finest on the planet - will get perhaps 5p a kilo. And as the film tells us one kilo of coffee beans makes about 80 cups of coffee. The arithmetic isn't difficult. This is one of the reasons Ethiopian farmers and their families are going hungry, need food aid and are getting out of coffee growing. Insane? As we say at the Food Programme - understand food and you're a long way on the road to understanding the way the world works.

Meanwhile we're gearing up in this little corner of the open plan on the 6th floor at Broadcasting House for this year's Radio 4 Food & Farming Awards - the 10th. A decade since Prince Charles handed out the first gongs.

Gearing up seems the right expression... adjusting the criteria for each award, appointing the judging panel (Chair, Raymond Blanc, plus Alex James, Rose Prince, Mark Hix, Simon Parkes, Lord Haskins, for starters), constructing the trails for Radio 4, setting up the website to take in nominations, starting a filing system for each of the nine categories, getting the help of a smart young intern for a couple of weeks. And then wondering how the hell the producers are going to cope with organising the judging, and recording, with at least one judge, at each place, on each short-list - 24 sites in all and if other years are a guide they'll be scattered from the Orkneys to the Scillies--all the while continuing to turn out The Food Programme every week. Every year it seems overwhelming, every year it's exhaustingly fascinating.

Sheila Dillon is presenter of The Food Programme

• Make a nomination for the 2009 Food & Farming Awards.
• Some photographs of Sheila Dillon and producer Rebecca Moore in the studio on 23 July 2009.
• Paul Levy's blog post about the changes at Slow Food UK in The Guardian.
• The Financial Times reports on a plan by Ethiopian migrants to market Fair Trade coffee in the UK.
• The Guardian's special report on WTO Cancun.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldtonight

Editor's note: We're trying something new. Every Friday afternoon during the Summer we're going to publish a diary post from an important Radio 4 personality. We're starting with Robin Lustig, presenter of The World Tonight since 1989. If you'd like to hear from a particular Radio 4 personality (a presenter, a programme maker or even a senior manager), leave a comment and we'll see what we can do.

One of the many good things about working for The World Tonight is that you get weekends off. And as someone who spent more than a decade working on a Sunday newspaper, I still find the notion of a two-day weekend a wonderful novelty.

But when I travel, it's different. After a hard week at the studio coal-face (six programmes in five days since you ask, three at the World Service and three at The World Tonight), I was up on Saturday morning for the 10-hour flight to Mexico.

The following day, Sunday, we were straight off into the countryside to start collecting material. I love travelling, and will always leap at the chance to shove my passport into my pocket and head off to some distant location. So I don't really resent the occasional missed weekends (well, not too much, anyway).

When I started as a reporter, long before the days of mobile phones or laptop computers, I was taught that the first thing you had to do when you went out on an assignment was find a public phone box that worked, so that you could phone in your story.

The 21st century broadcaster's equivalent when you're overseas is find a location from which your satellite dish can transmit a signal. More often than not, you end up on the roof of your hotel.

But our Mexico City hotelier wasn't keen on letting us on to his roof - and his car park, which is the usual Plan B, had high walls round it - so we started touring city centre hotels to find one with a roof or a balcony facing in the right direction. Eventually, mission accomplished: sound engineer Jacques Sweeney pronounced himself satisfied; producer Beth McLeod negotiated a special cheap deal on behalf of licence fee-payers, and we were ready to roll.

We do a lot of "multi-platform content delivery" these days. Which means we blog, we write for News Online, and we even pop up on other people's programmes. So after a week of scurrying about for The World Tonight, and a quick chat with nice Mr Humphrys on the The Today programme, we were up at 5am the following Sunday to contribute first to The World This Weekend on Radio 4, and then immediately afterwards to Newshour on the World Service. The joys of working west of the Greenwich meridian meant we were done by 8am, and were able to take a few hours' break to visit the stunning Aztec ruins at Teotihuacan, an hour's drive from Mexico City. (The pictures are in The World Tonight Flickr group here).

I love coming home, of course, but I don't much like 10-hour overnight flights (yes, of course, in Economy). So I was perhaps just slightly grumpy when the BA pilot informed us that it had been raining at Heathrow (rain? In July? Who would have thought it?), and that the airport was in a bit of a mess. We parked about a mile away from Terminal 5 and waited first for the steps and then for the bus to carry us back to civilisation. But I mustn't grumble: I wasn't due back on air till the next day - and I did have a weekend off to look forward to. Jet lag? Don't know the meaning of the word.

• Robin wrote a series of posts for The World Tonight blog from his trip to Mexico.
• The World Tonight's home page and Robin's World Tonight blog.
• Robin's BBC Press Office biography.