I’d just like your company for a while, can we do that? Normally when I write to you it’s first thing on a Friday morning and actually it’s not that different now: wait one second… there, it’s just gone midnight on Thursday night. Midnight when it’s raining heavily outside, I’m by a fire, I’ve got tea and toast, and I’ve just finished a 15-hour working day.

Look, I’m actually getting a bit weary of remembering things, I’d rather be doing something new. And lately it’s been all memory. The other day I drove to London on my own but accompanied by about thirty events I remembered from previous drives to the BBC. Plus I’ve been watching a lot of archive television and shuddering at the thought it’s an archive now.

Sometimes the two collide, such as how I’ve just finished rewatching the first season of Mad About You from 1992/93 and it is inextricably tied to my time on BBC Ceefax and then on Radio Times. I remember an editor on RT who didn’t like the show and I remember watching an episode on a newsroom’s tiny monitor.

Today though, or tonight rather, I’m remembering a sensation and that’s what I want to enjoy with you.

I can’t define it, I can just describe the circumstances, which go thisaway. It’s late, obviously, that’s crucial, and the day has been long but you’ve achieved something, you’ve created something. It might be something no one else thinks is worth doing, but you do and you’ve done it. What’s more, you’ve done it with other people who are on that blurry line between colleague and friend.

And then you’re all at someone’s kitchen table. Big table, half a dozen people, all talking together, all splitting off briefly into this smaller group or that larger conversation, and all drinking tea. Maybe I just mix with the wrong crowd there, but the tea is important, more important and more useful, more needed, that alcohol would have been.

It’s the sense that you all did something together and that you played your part. That you lived up to what everyone in this group did, what they all needed.

And, I now think, it could also be that there has to be radio involved somewhere. I think I associate this feeling and that circumstance with BBC Radio WM, I know it definitely started for me earlier with BHBN hospital radio.

I spent tonight editing a podcast for a client.

Hosted it, recorded it, now edited it. That’s as close to radio as I can get, yet it’s also got to be just about as far away from the radio I knew as you can be. Two people speaking on the show, and then just me and my Mac pulling it together. Plenty of editing, no sign of the old tape and chinagraph pencils and razor blades, just a point and a click.

But the same muscles in shaping audio. The same way you know when this cut is right and that one isn’t.

I don’t really miss the way radio used to be edited, although somewhere in my office I have a tape block that you used to use for this and which nobody now can fathom what it’s for. I definitely didn’t miss stringing tape around my neck to remember which bit was which, although I do have several reels of tape in my office.

What I miss is sitting around the table with you afterwards. Thanks for giving me that through this.

Now, you’re looking tired. I’ll drive you home.