For as long as I can remember, whenever my father and uncles spoke lovingly of their motorbikes, of speed and the wind in their hair, the road they spoke most of was the A127, the Southend Arterial, with its three-mile straights, out beyond Gallows Corner. It was where they could push their Nortons and Triumphs up to 100mph, ‘doing the ton’ down to the Halfway House roundabout and back.

For their sons, the Boy Racers in their two door Ford Capris and jacked-up Escort Mk1s, the road to ride was one of sharp bends and swift change-downs, of New Towns and land fills – the A13. This was the main drag out to the Promised Land of the Goldmine Discotheque on Canvey Island, caravan capital of the world. This was the route to the Kursaal at Southend and a plate of cockles or a cup of whelks. This was the road to the paradise of the Kiss-Me-Quick Never Never Land of the Essex Coast.

The A13 begins life as the Commercial Road at Gardiners Corner in Whitechapel where the City of London meets the old East End and, travelling eastwards, it is possible to read the progress of London’s development as a metropolis like the growth rings of a tree. Late Georgian squares give way to Victorian streets full of cottage terraces in areas pock -marked by the post-war high rise flats that replaced the dwellings destroyed by the Blitz. Hawksmoor churches built in the early 18th century nestle next to Peabody Buildings beneath the shadow of Canary Wharf.

Here the A13 is a bustling thoroughfare, constantly clogged with trans-continental juggernauts looking in vain for a cross-London link road.

Once past Poplar Town Hall, the A13 becomes the East India Dock Road, recalling a time when the wharves of East London bulged with the plunder of empire. Where, in the late 19th century, the Labour movement was born in the struggle for the docker’s tanner, huge printing works now stand, escaping from the high rents of the City. Nearby a newly arrived workforce are living in penthouse flats on the Isle of Dogs in places with such evocative names as Marsh Wall and Mudchute.

It’s at the end of this stretch, just past where the mouth of the Blackwall Tunnel gorges on traffic, only to spew it  out again into Greenwich, that the A13 proper begins. As you cross the River Lea at Canning Town with its fine views of Bow Creek, for the first time the full glory of this road can be savoured. From here on, it's dual carriageway, flyovers and underpasses, four lanes wide, all the way to the M25.

As you speed up the Newham Way and onto the Barking by-pass, you are afforded a fine view of the Beckton Alp, where the upwardly mobile residents of East Ham can practice their moves on the artificial ski-slope. When I was a child, this commanding height was the soot-black slag heap of the Beckton Gasworks, once the biggest in the world. Now, grassed over and with a ski-lift plonked on top, it aspires to become the Cockney Klosters.

Crossing the River Roding, just beyond the junction with the new North Circular Road, the A13 takes on the title of ‘Alfred’s Way’, linking the area to the time when Viking longships glided through the creek mists to loot and burn the great Benedictine Abbey of Barking during the reign of Alfred the Great.

Where once the Abbess held sway over the fortunes of south west Essex, now stands Henry Ford, who built his mighty motor works on the Dagenham marshes in the 1920s on the site of the aptly named America Farm. Rumour has it that on the wharves at Fords there are super rats, as big as tabbies, immune to poison and hunted with rifles by men who work best in darkness and no matter what time of day it is, there are some parts of Fords where it is always night.

It is around here that the A13 becomes a spiral arm of the London conurbation, a strung-out collection of warehouses, haulage firms and post-war semis. The badge of Essex County Council, a red shield emblazoned with three curved Saxon swords , was a common enough sight on public works and school workbooks in my childhood, but in 1965 an act of parliament banished it from that part of Greater London that is forever Essex.

The M25 forms a triumphal arch over the A13 near Aveley and, once through this symbolic gate in the new London Wall, you find yourself in a land steeped in history. Although the inhabitants of nearby Mucking were only too pleased to change the name of their village to Stanford-le-Hope, it was here in May 1381 that the Peasants Revolt began, when locals attacked the King’s Commissioner who had come to levy the hated Poll Tax.

The land here is flat right down to Kent. One Tree Hill, the highest point in southern Essex, is a small ridge left by receding glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Down by the cold grey waters of the Thames Estuary, the remains of several Martello Towers still wait for Napoleon to sail up the river and attack Tilbury Fort. Meanwhile, the Circus Tavern at Purfleet waits for the Four Tops to play a return engagement at ‘Essex’s Ritziest Nitespot’.

 Around Canvey Island the mudflats of the Thames Estuary end and the beaches that make Southend-on-Sea so popular begin. Originally the south end of the village of Prittlewell, the town rose to prominence during the bathing boom of the 1790s when the aristocracy flocked to the coast in order to benefit from the medicinal properties of sea breezes.

They built the Grand Hotel overlooking the Promenade and when the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway was completed in 1856, the town became the holiday destination for generations of East Enders looking for some respite from their everyday urban existence.

Southend is the mecca of Essex, with its Golden Mile and longest pier in Britain. However, for my family, paradise was to be found beyond the arcades and winkle stalls, past the coloured lights that flashed out a welcome on even the wettest, windiest days. Go along the East Beach, past where Edwardian beach huts still stand in rows, through Thorpe Bay to the hamlet of Shoeburyness. Here, out of the mouth of the Thames Estuary, facing the North Sea itself, you will find the finest beach in the county.

It was here that I came with my parents as a boy to sit on towels on the sand and watch the Thames sailing barges lazily cross the horizon, listening out for the big Navy guns being tested on Foulness Island, eating sandwiches from Tupperware containers.

One of the fondest memories of my childhood concerns the time my father let me drive his green Morris Oxford very, very slowly across the field that served as a car park behind the beach. It was my first ever driving lesson and it ended abruptly when I nervously stamped the brake pedal down to the floor and father banged his head on the windscreen.

I must have been about twelve years old yet I can still feel the leather of the driver’s seat warm on my bare back and hear the bonk as father, sitting half-sideways and caught unawares, hit the Triplex hard. What great days. Every visit we would buy a plastic football and lose it before we went home and sometimes, if the tide was out, my little brother and I would walk almost to Holland it seemed, watched over through parental binoculars as we jumped in the puddles all the way back.

Shoeburyness. That name brings back memories of days spent far away from the cares of home, when everything was fun except bedtime. The beaches are still there but the green Morris Oxford has gone the way of so many precious things and I shall never see it again. Me and my dad have joined the Saxons and the Peasants Revolt in history but the A13 is still there, rolling through a Springsteenesque landscape in which riverine Essex takes the place of the New Jersey shore, a tarmacadam trail to the Promised Land.

Listen to Billy Bragg's Lyrical Journeys: 'A13, Trunk Road to the Sea'

Hello

It was a close call.  After the programme Jane Francis and Carrie Lear continued to talk about the climbing count of CO2 which was pumping up global warming, in their opinion, which would lead most dramatically to mass flooding.  On the programme Richard Corfield did not join in very enthusiastically, pointing out that the CO2 count had been at least twice as high quite recently (geologically speaking) and even higher than that a bit before recently.  The situation was beginning to develop into a relevant, contemporary conversation about climate change and the final bell was a merciful release.  There was no thought of the ingenuity of men and women combating what would be a gradual increase (if it happens) of rising sea levels - we could have looked at the Dutch in the sixteenth century onwards.  But I strayed from my task.

The grim conclusion of Jane Francis was never to buy or rent a house on a flood plain, always to buy or rent a house on a hill, or take a tent, or anything, as long as it's on a hill and, I think Richard Corfield added, fortify it.  Well, well.

Left Broadcasting House to see a rough cut of a film about David Hare.  The last time there was a television profile of him was in 1983 on the South Bank Show.  His eloquence and his thoughtfulness are almost in a league of their own.  We talked about his plays over the last ten years, concentrating especially on the verbatim plays - Stuff Happens, etc.

Working in a cutting room with a director and a film editor is as good as it gets for me in television.  It has an intensity comparable to that which is called for on In Our Time.  Shaping, shaving this sentence, reorganising, finding the right length and the pulse of a particular episode in a film or a scene.  There's nothing as satisfying as thinking you've got it right and seeing in front of your eyes the results of what you think is right.  Of course, in a few days' time your view might change, but as a thing of the moment, it takes some beating.

Then off to do some commentary for a film on Alfie Boe - an extraordinary fairytale story which seems to be one of the regular performance-related stories of the last hundred years, i.e. a variant on rags to riches.

Then a decent stretching of the legs before one of the great pleasures in life - lunch with an old pal.  In this case an old and close pal and the unique pleasure of total trust, non-agenda, ease.  One of the great benefits of ageing.

And then a lovely walk round Green Park in the sun, past the monument to Bomber Command through whose columns you can see Number One, London, the house of Wellington.  War beckons to war across Hyde Park Corner.

And then down into St James's Park with the ducks enjoying the sunshine.  Or do they?  We'll never know what they think or even if they think as we think.  Sublimely they take no notice of us except when we offer them crumbs, but that's nothing more than duck-love.  An old and rather large man, a man who came straight from the Orthodox streets of Jerusalem, pushing a small child in a pram and beaming like someone in an extremely happy novel.  He stopped the pushchair, pulled out a carefully wrapped piece of cake and offered it to the child.  He dropped it and picked it up, and with just the slightest glance round gave the child back the cake, which after so much care had been - well, contaminated is too strong a word but let's say desterilised by contact with the ground.  A young woman with her boyfriend/partner epitomised Valentine's Day.  She, dressed in tight black with red tulips, earnestly photographing - yes - the ducks, and he, hovering to put his arm around her when she had finished this exacting task.

The area around Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament quite remarkably free of people today.  Is everybody preparing for Valentine's night, or is this the subdued beginning of the Easter journey after Ash Wednesday?

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

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Editor's note. Sarah Mukherjee, Radio 4's Environment Correspondent, was in Copenhagen for Cop15's messy finale. She wrote this sketch from the corridors outside the official meeting rooms as the formal agenda fell apart. As you'll have read, things didn't go exactly as she - or anyone else - expected - SB.

International conferences like these are like being in a diabolical airport lounge. Lots of people from all over the world, some rushing, others wandering.

I've been to several of these climate change talks over the years, and this seems to be the bloated older brother of all the others put together. Thousands of people - twice as many accredited as the venue could hold, flying from all over the world to talk about reducing global carbon emissions. The irony has not been lost on many of the journalists and other observers who have not made the trip.

The whole affair, both the logistics and the talks themselves, appear to be creaking at the seams - which makes it very difficult to cover as a story. In the early days of this process (we're talking years ago here), the whole thing was small enough to be held in a medium-sized conference centre.

If you hung around people's hotel rooms and the meeting areas when the ministers of two countries met (the 'bi-laterals' as they are known), they'd come out for a chat and tell you how everything was going. Now, people meet in 'delegation areas' that appear to be several hours' walk away from the press area, which is itself very distant from the main negotiation halls.

The weight of expectation has seemingly made things more, rather than less than less, difficult for not only the organisers, but also those who have come here, ostensibly to save the planet. It's like a weird town with its own language, its own rituals and its own rules.

There are meetings to agree on money for small countries to develop clean technologies, on whether countries will get money for reforestation (can you see there's a bit of a theme here), and how to measure carbon emissions reduction. So far, the meeting appears to be struggling to agree a text for the leaders to argue over.

The rich countries want the emerging economies like India and China to agree to curb their carbon dioxide emissions in the future; the emerging economies want industralised nations to accept deep, legally binding targets for reducing CO2 - and the poor countries want money and technological help.

So - will there be a deal? Well, it will be difficult to get 110 leaders here to talk without coming up with something they can all sign up to.

But maybe a more germane question for us in the UK is what difference will it make - if any - to daily life. As one delegate from another EU country told me: "offering developing countries billions of pounds to sign up to a deal is all very well - but where is the money going to come from, and how do we sell it to voters back home?"

Unlike many international processes, charities and pressure groups have always been fairly central to the negotiations. They have led the science, often becoming government negotiators and advisers as climate change has become a bigger public policy issue. So when huge numbers of those who were accredited to attend for the first week were told their passes were no longer valid for the second, there was undisguised fury. The Friends of the Earth grouping staged a sit-in, and many former delegates have been religiously turning up trying to get in. As more world leaders appear, they have had less and less luck,until now they are reduced to sitting outside the perimeter fence chanting.

We had the requisite demo, the requisite political positioning; now it comes down, as these things almost always do, to two men sitting in a room. President Obama and Premier Wen of China are meeting to try and finally settle their differences; nobody is betting that they will

Sarah Mukherjee is Radio 4's Environment Correspondent

• Read how things actually turned out on BBC News Online's special Cop15 page. The Guardian has one too. So does The Telegraph and The Independent used LiveJournal to run a Copenhagen blog.
• Picture by bjaglin. Used under licence.

Drive through the southern Highlands between Braemar and Pitlochry at this time of year and they look pretty bleak. After thirty miles of bleached heather it comes as a shock to see a splash of colour on the horizon. Drive closer and you come to a couple of acres of luxuriant vegetation on an exposed hillside, 1000 feet above sea level - trees heavy with apples as big as your fist and storybook-sized turnips bursting from the soil.

For Costing the Earth we've set our new presenter, Dr. Alice Roberts - fresh from TV's 'Coast' - the challenge of tracking down the minerals we've lost from our staple foods in the past seventy years. Perthshire growers, Moira and Cameron Thomson are convinced they've found them again, languishing as waste in their local quarry. By adding rock dust they believe they can mimic the action of ice ages, recharging the soil with the vital minerals that should make their way into the fruit and veg they grow.

Alice and I tucked into some incredibly sweet gooseberries and munched on freshly pulled endive while Cameron pulled parsnips out of the ground, in search of one big enough to really impress us. Giving up, he took us back into the farmhouse to show us a frozen head of broccoli that could feed a family of five for a week. Over coffee Cameron took pencil and paper to explain his theories of geological shifts, climate change and shifting ice sheets. There's nothing Alice likes more than a good scientific argument so I sat back and sipped my coffee as they tore into each other over the crashing impact of ice sheets on the Highland landscape.

When I finally steered Alice back to the car Moira waved us off with the news that the inspiration for their theories- and their vocation over the past twenty years- came from a Radio 4 programme they heard in 1983. I'll leave the scientists to judge the detail of their ideas, but if Radio 4 inspired those gooseberries thriving on a blasted hillside then we've contributed just a little to civilisation.

• Costing the Earth - The Great Mineral Heist is broadcast at 0900 on Monday 28th September and repeated at 1330 on Thursday 3rd October.
• Farming Today covered the soil depletion story this morning at 0545. Listen again.
• The picture shows Moira and Cameron Thomson and is used with their permission.

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.