Yeah and it's really interesting isn't it because I think Theresa May in a different context said a citizen of the world as a citizen of nowhere. Oh, well, you've had the case,

you became toxic. It became toxic. Yes, yes, yes. It was politicised, it was weaponised by

some people. It was a very personal thing. But you, it seems to me, are a citizen of the world, in the truest sense of the world. You seem at home in lots of places and love the cultures and that sort of thing but you still feel able to be rooted in Canada.

I think being rooted is really important, it's like a tree isn't it? If the roots are strong then you can grow tall and the bowels can spread out and think if you are strongly rooted or anchored then you can travel far and wide because you always know that the roots are there holding you.

I'm always worried about saying these sort of things to you, what I'm about to say because you're unbelievably modest and you protest. So you have to take it on trust that there are lots of people who think you're an extraordinary person and do extraordinary things and some of the people that are involved in the podcast are like excited about you coming on. And I want to understand how you became, who you are now, the person who's reporting from Afghanistan and Ukraine and Syria, you came from a sort of corner of Canada, the eastern corner of Canada, how does that happen? How do you become the BBC's international editor who's in all of these places?

Well first of all, I do have to protest and you know maybe what people see in me, they see something of themselves because in some way I'm very ordinary in the sense and I certainly I regard myself as that, that I decided what I wanted to do and I got on with it and you asked how it is and some ways it is extraordinary that I came from a very small town on the east coast of Canada. Even in Canadian terms it is regarded as a bit back and beyond which I discovered when I went to university at a quite an elite university in the centre of the country and people would tease me to say, oh really you're from New Brunswick? I just thought Canada ended at Montreal, ha ha ha, and I thought you say it's a joke but actually as all jokes, there's something serious in it so that it's the kind of it was the heures of wood and the drawers of water, the poorest part of Canada. People say, oh there's only eight people from New Brunswick at this university. To this day of all the places I've been it was the biggest culture shock, going from small town Canada to the big city and to a very different culture. I was from very beginning, very very curious, in fact too curious, in fact it became a problem when I did my BA honours. I was in the Department of Politics but I was taking all these courses and professors were offering me reading courses and at one point about six months before graduation the head of the department said, how many courses is least taking? It's impossible for her to finish all those courses in time to graduate so there was this huge kerfuffle so that this reading course was cancelled, that course was cancelled so that I graduated and I remember that day when the graduation was in this big huge arena and the head of the politics department was conferring the degree and I got up there and he said, these you made it and the microphone was such that I then laughed and the laugh went all across the big this huge arena and I tell that to graduate students now, take it in your stride and I wanted to be a journalist and I wanted to be a foreign correspondent and I didn't want to spend a lot of time on a desk, I just wanted to go and be a foreign correspondent so I got after I did my MA in international studies at the University of Toronto, I got a volunteer assignment which was a genuine thing, I went to West Africa and taught in a school for this organization called Canadian Crossroads International which sends young Canadians abroad to work on short-term assignments and then people from Africa, the Caribbean, mainly Asia, they then come to Canada so it's kind of an exchange and the Ethiopian Authority said no, the attachment for Lisa to set won't work because we see she wants to become a journalist and because my because I have French ancestry, they said oh Lisa to set she can go to Kote Vuara, Ivory Coast, she can work in adzo pay, what a great name, adzo pay and you know, Craig to this day, I'm so glad I started in a village because I lived in the rhythms of the village, I got to know the villagers, I lived in the school where I was also teaching so it taught me that it's you know, that face to face and the heat and the dust from the ground up where you really get to know how people live and work, what they believe was my first time, it was both a Christian culture, pagan culture, Muslim culture and so I was living within all these different cultures and that came to define my journalism, I wasn't the kind of journals who just went here or there, I spent five years in Africa, five years in Afghanistan, Pakistan with some trips to Iran, five years in the Middle East, when I went there I went there to stay to get stuck in, you know the one of the first things I do wherever I go is I go to a grocery store, I want to see what they're selling at the shops, I want to be you know like a flunner going around the streets, finding out you know

the rhythm of the place and I think that's what's defined by journalism.