“WELCOME home Nick.” Three kind words I’ve heard dozens of times this past week — my first back at the BBC.

Three words uttered by old friends and colleagues and by people I’d only ever known by their voices in my ear warning me that I’m on next or that I’ve only ten seconds left. Three words that left me touched yet oddly unnerved. It was the idea that the BBC was “home”. It felt somehow too cosy, too suggestive of the idea that there’s nowhere else worth working than Her Majesty’s Corporation. It made me feel as if I were moving back in with Mum and Dad after years of independence.

But then something happened. I spoke to traffic. Not the moving car variety, you understand. “Traffic” is BBC Radio’s equivalent of the Fat Controller managing the arrival of correspondents’ dispatches, ensuring that they end up where they are supposed to.

One day in Westminster, the next on the roof of a hotel in Beijing and then in the grounds of the Indian Prime Minister’s residence I say hello to “traffic”, who greet me cheerily and record my words and never once comment on my stumbles and retakes. Around the globe other reporters were doing the same. I confess that I find this impossibly romantic. It makes me feel, yes, very much at home.

I’ve never confessed these feelings openly to the nameless souls who are “traffic”. It would be much too embarrassing. It’s not that we don’t chat. We do, but not as we once did. When I first became a reporter I tended to gossip and, it’s been alleged, to flirt outrageously with the attractive female voices that filled my headphones. Then one day an old newsroom hand took me to one side. “You do realise, don’t you,” he said, “that every word you say to ‘traffic’ can be heard on every speaker in this room?” Since then when I hear traffic announce that “Nick Robinson’s on the line from . . .” I have been ever so careful to behave.

It fell to the man from the Press Association to restore proper standards. Jon Smith showed what a true reporter is made of when the rickety Chinese minibus he was travelling in lost its struggle to keep up with the Prime Ministerial convoy racing across Beijing. His jalopy had a blowout and smashed into a barrier leaving poor Jon with a broken collar bone and concussion. The story reached London long before it reached the rest of the Downing Street press party.

Before lying back in the ambulance that took him to hospital Jon insisted on ringing his newsdesk to file the story.

Nick Robinson is the BBC’s Political Editor

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