We do quote, though, even if pointlessly. “We live, we never bloody learn” is a line from Jack Rosenthal’s The Knowledge. Good luck finding that on any streaming platform, though the script was published and I must’ve read it twenty times over the years. Actually, I haven’t read a script today: I must go find that.

And in any other way I can find, put off saying what’s on my mind.

But you’re looking at me now. Okay. This week Facebook threw up a memory with an image, a photo of me in my 20s, probably. Sitting at a BBC Radio WM desk, a Mark III Local Radio desk if you’re keen to be precise, and looking like I knew what I was doing.

I did.

The photo is staged, I now abruptly remember: it was a Saturday, I’d worked that desk all day, and it was late afternoon or early evening, when the shows were done, the work was over, and a couple of us were just coming down from the high and working up to leaving. So I know I wasn’t really watching for anything there, I wasn’t really about to bring up any audio, but I had been doing that for a good six or more hours before the photo was taken.

Here’s a thing, though. I liked those moments after a show, the peace after the mad rushing, the sense of a job either well done or at least not cocked up completely. They were halcyon moments.

But the hours before were not.

I can’t remember now what time I would start on a Saturday but it was late enough — perhaps 11am, perhaps noon — that there was plenty of time to do other things beforehand and just occasionally, I would try. Usually I’d spend the morning worrying about the afternoon. And as well as this image in front of me, what came back this week, what comes back now, is an image of me sitting in my car in a Birmingham city centre car park, with ten minutes to go before I had to leave for the studio, and with a fight going on in my stomach because of the nerves.

The shows I worked on then, those Saturdays, were sports shows and sport to me is in a parallel universe, it means nothing, I care nothing for it. And there were times when it would’ve been just a little handy to know something more about it, but the truth is that the topic doesn’t matter. What you have to do in order to deliver it to audiences is exactly the same, and so much so that things I was taught then I am using now, a preposterous thirty years later.

Only, there’s something else I’m still doing now, a preposterous thirty years later.

I am getting nervous. I’ve taken on a new project that in every way imaginable is straightforward, but it’s also very bitty and I’m anxious not to do any of the bits wrong, I’m anxious not to do them in the wrong order. I can’t tell you what it is, but then you can’t imagine how simple a production it is so we’re possibly even.

I know the nerves are not warranted, not in the slightest, and I mostly wish I didn’t have them so that something which should take a couple of hours doesn’t end up monopolising the day.

But equally, I’m thirty years older than I was in that photo and still I am feeling the same energetic nerves, still caring, still learning. I’m going to decide that’s a good thing.