91Èȱ¬

Hi. I've been presenting WHYS since it started, first as a cover presenter and then as a fixture when Steve and then Anu moved on. Before joining WHYS full-time, I was also presenting The World Today and The Ticket on the 91Èȱ¬ World Service and Up All Night on 91Èȱ¬ Radio Five Live. That was always covering for colleagues though so it was a huge thrill when Mark offered me a regular gig.

I can't stop checking our blog and am always badgering WHYS colleagues about one thing or another ('blog rants' as one kindly put it). So I've come on as I paid little attention to computers for quite a while. When friends at college were emailing each other I was hand-writing essays, and I can still remember having to ask a friend what to do once I'd typed in a website address.

That was more recently than I'd care to admit but fortunately the next year I got a job editing carlton.com (a now defunct UK TV company) and managed to get into the swing of things. From there I went on to edit timeout.com and it was only when they made us redundant that I actually got on with trying to get into radio.

My first job was on the Simon Mayo programme on Five Live and a certain Mark (WHYS Editor) was in charge. He got me working on an Internet hour that we used to do. I don't know how good it was (in fact I do, and it frequently wasn't), but it got us both thinking about how live radio and the Internet can work together. Fortunately Mark worked it out a few years later.

I lived in Port of Spain and Nassau while growing up, and Johannesburg after college, and got heavily into the history and music of southern Africa and the Caribbean. (I used to run a night in Brixton playing tunes from both regions but fatherhood has put pay to that, at least temporarily). And the travelling keeps on coming as we've been lucky enough to take WHYS all over the place. Meeting some of you thousands of miles from home and hearing how you listen to the show and what you like and don't like is always the highlight. I can never quite get my head round it.

I'm well aware I don't always get it right when hosting WHYS so suggestions on how I moderate our discussions are very welcome. There's a page about me here that bbcworldservice.com asked me to do, but I'm not sure there's much there that adds to this.