I

wanted

to talk this sort of

taking you back a bit and the fact that you've aged and grown and learned early on in your first memoir, you describe the young you and the impact that you had on loved ones. So the generation before the race, your son now, for example, and you say, like a clumsy waiter, I've left behind me a trail of smashed relationships. It feels quite a violent word. It's like you're choosing a word that is looking at those relationships and thinking, got that had a really impact there.

You know, I, I feel very, very kind of responsible for wrecking my first marriage. And it was simply the job that did it in those sort of awful conversations you have when you're breaking up with somebody. My wife said, I understand you really like your job and enjoy your job. But she said, can you imagine how painful it is for me? Only three days after you get back from something awful, you're starting to talk about leaving again. And you know, I was too sort of self obsessed and to wrapped up in myself to to understood the pain that that gave. I do understand it now. And I'm, you know, but what

would you say to your younger self? Because you're also talking about that you have this drive, the need to go and be there and to witness the truth and that kind of thing. That must have been, if anything, even stronger, I suspect in your younger self. What would you say to yourself at that time now?

Well, I often think it's much better if you're not, if you're not married and you don't have those ties, if you're doing a job, a job like that, it's much, much better for everybody else, if you don't, if you don't have those commitments. I started off in a rather different way, although in fact, I was covering the violence in Northern Ireland when I was my first job as a correspondent. But it, you know, I lived, we lived in Ireland. So I was just able to, it was only a drive away. It didn't seem so dangerous. And we had a family and I kind of assumed it would all, in my life, would always be that a sort of foreign correspondent going to places we went on to Brussels where there was no noticeable danger, except, you know, just overeating. But something happened while I was in Brussels and I got involved in covering the Angolan War. And I think the BBC thought that I should do a bit more of that kind of stuff. And although I was scared, I did also enjoy it. And

this sounds brutal.