EATING, SLEEPING AND BREATHING THE NEWS

I get enough of this stuff at work, without taking it home with me

It's not easy working in current affairs.

By its very definition, news can happen any moment, day or night. This means as part of the country's most authoritative news radio production team, I basically have to have my finger on the pulse 24 hours a day.

Not one newspaper is printed without passing over my desk. My MySky has all the major news bulletins series linked - even Prime. I'm constantly trawling the interweb for the merest hint of an international story.

News is my obsession. It's the first thing I think about when I get up in the morning and I don't go to bed, because I don't want to miss any big stories. News junkies don't come any more tragic than me.

Not.

I lied, okay? When I applied for this job (about 12 years ago, but who's counting?) I assured my interviewers I knew news. I subscribed to a wide selection of magazines. The 6 o'clock bulletins were appointment viewing in my house and I had all the major dailies delivered to my door.

Okay, I didn't say that in so many words, but I definitely implied it. To be perfectly frank, by 8:30 each morning I've had about enough reality for one day. By the time I get to my car, I've tuned the rest of the world out and turned the play-list on my phone up. Anyone who knows me at all knows my sole goal in life is to get home as soon as possible so I can melt cheese on things, sit on the couch and watch B-grade movies.

Why immerse myself in the world of disaster, politics, finance, murder and mayhem when I can probably get all that in one episode of Game of Thrones? News, while constantly changing, is certainly interesting, but not usually much fun.

So I like to simply check out and let it go on without me for a while. You see, over the years what I've learned is, news will still happen whether I'm watching or not. In fact, these days my primary source of news is the Domestic Manager. Often she arrives home from work and asks me, "How about that crash/scandal/storm/murder/war/wedding/sports result?" 

(Actually, that's not quite true - the Domestic Manager would never express any interest in a sports result, I was just throwing that in for effect)

99 times out of 100, I don't know anything about the crash/scandal/storm/murder/war/wedding she's so excited by. The sports result I will have caught sometimes - I've tried to give up following sport, but it's a surprisingly hard habit to break.

Do I feel guilty I've often missed the biggest story of the day? Quite the opposite. I find the experience exhilarating. Take Sunday night, for example...

All weekend, I'd cocooned myself in my usual snuggly blanket of blissful ignorance, only to discover an airliner had landed at SFO minus a tail and a couple of its passengers, and a driverless train-load of crude oil had collided with an entire Canadian town, blowing most of it up.

I actually really like going from not knowing anything about stories like that, to being blasted with them from every angle. It's a bit like jumping into a freezing lake after sitting in a hot spa; as long as your heart keeps beating, it makes you feel incredibly alive.

Hopefully, my all or nothing approach to following the news doesn't make me any worse at my job, otherwise my next performance review might be a little rocky. If anything, perhaps I'm attacking each morning's show with a fresh point of view, so we can put a new twist on something our listeners may have first heard about the night before.

In the end it's about work/life balance - and when other people's lives are the focus of your work, I find the healthy option is to leave rest of the world at the office. I've got cheese to melt.

It's hard to ignore a story this big, but I managed