I'm from London and came to live in the Netherlands in February 2007. I studied broadcast journalism and politics for four years in the United States. To help finance my studies I regularly worked on several local television news programmes as a reporter and news reader.

Fortunately, they were only small stations and very few people watched, so I could make my mistakes without too many people noticing!

At the end of my studies I returned to the UK where I worked as a reporter and newsreader for television and radio, including BBC World Television, and News 24. I've covered a wide range of stories over the last 20 years. I've dodged mortars and bullets in places such as Bosnia and Somalia and done my fair share of fluffy animal stories too!

My first assignment abroad was to cover the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, not all of my assignments were in such exotic places. However, a few years ago I did get to spend five weeks filming in Antarctica on the work of British scientists there.

In 1986 I survived a bomb blast on an Air Lanka plane at Colombo airport in Sri Lanka. A Tamil terrorist put a bomb in the cargo hold while the plane was being refuelled to go on to the Maldives. Only minutes before I had been asked to move to another seat for the last part of my journey.

When the bomb exploded the back of the plane where I had been previously sitting was completely destroyed. Twenty-one people died. I consider it a very lucky escape. I was asked by the other surviving passengers to deal with the resulting world press attention and did several television and radio interviews about the explosion. However, I prefer to report the news rather than be a part of it!