'A typical day starts in my Victorian house in Hackney [London]. It's one of the poorest boroughs in Britain and I guess a lot of people must think either the BBC's not paying me enough or I'm mad, but I moved there 19 years ago with my wife because it was a place we could afford.
It does have poverty, but we stay because it's edgy. Hackney's a fantastic mix of cultures and wealth, one of those interesting areas that show what urban living is meant to be about. Moving to the suburbs would be, to me, a bit like being put to sleep for a long time.
I'll have a quick breakfast, two cups of coffee and leave the house at about 8.30am. I drive right across the city to work, which is in the west of London. I've tried public transport but it's complicated, dirty and unreliable. I've also reached the stage where people start approaching me with their mobile phones and asking, 'Can I take a picture of you?' That's fine when I'm coming back from work, I don't mind what the hell happens to me, but when I'm going there I need to collect my thoughts. However easy you make it look, you're going on live TV, millions of people are going to watch you, and you're exposed in a way you're not in any other form of journalism.
I'll get to work at about 9.30am. The next part of my routine is make-up. The make-up artists have a lot more work to do than they did a couple of years ago; there are greater and greater expanses of forehead to deal with. They've got a spray they can use to make it look like you have a full head of hair but I've resisted that so far. I'm determined to grow old gracefully on the box.
At 12pm World News Today goes on the air. It's a tough programme to do, very heavy on interviews. I probably have only a couple of hours in which to prepare to discuss a whole load of topics with people who live and breathe their particular conflicts and disagreements. Having been in the business for 20 years, I have a hinterland of knowledge to draw on and that's really important. As a presenter, if you just get rammed up in front of the camera because you know how to dress well or have a nice voice, you'll get found out pretty quickly. Even with the background it's an enormous challenge to conduct these interviews, to know what questions to ask, to sort out when people are simply scoring points off each other and when you have to intervene.
That'll go through to about 1pm then I'll head to our canteen, the Filling Station - or as most at the BBC call it, the killing station. The poor people there do their best but there are only so many ways you can cut a ham sandwich.
I take my sandwich and soup or whatever and go to sit in my editor's office - unlike anchors in North America, who have dressing rooms and lots of minions, we don't even have our own desks. I spend some time catching up on domestic news because the main evening bulletin I do is for the home audience. I begin preparing for the 6pm news at about 2pm and by 3pm I've started writing the bulletin. I'll have had a conversation with my editor on the programme and how he's planning to run it but, like all journalists, I love it when a story breaks and you've got to throw the running order away. The adrenalin rush that kicks in is the thing we all thrive on.