My first late-ish night working in studio before our review today. I spent most of the afternoon and evening and night listening to BBC Radio 5 via the internet, due to the great sporting events on offer...Arsenal babies in the Carling Cup and the fabulous, exciting, result-of-the-century Red Sox win. It was pretty strange listening to baseball commentary via the BBC, interrupted with the news and travel updates from 3am Britain (flooding on the A28 etc), and then catching the shipping forecast and the first hour of the Today programme, thinking of all my friends who wake up to it in the morning, before going to bed myself at around 3am.

It's amazing how the slightest stimulus awakens memories; I could hear the precise sounds of London waking around me, the noise of cars along Cheshire Street and my boiler clicking in the morning, the expected background to John Humphrys' voice. Despite not being homesick at all here, the nostalgia and the sense of 'old England' was unexpected. Compared to NPR, the culture of the BBC is pretty extraordinary.

Another football aside: Andrew Freear, our director, used to be a professional goalkeeper for Sunderland FC in his former life...