Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the journalist Eve Pollard, a former editor of the Sunday Mirror and

Sunday Express, she's among the First Lady's of Fleet Street. For a while she shared an

office with Jeffrey Bernard and Keith Waterhouse. Then there was a time when Lynn Franks

was her secretary whilst Janet Street Porter worked next door.

Fleet Street was, she says, like a village and it looked after its own.

Growing up, her parents had no ambitions for her other than to marry and have children.

So, after a career that spanned magazines,

novels, biographies and TV, she acknowledges the glass ceilings she's shattered,

but comments, no woman who says they have had it all has had it all. You stick

by that, do you leave, Pollard, I'm trying to imagine what it is you sacrificed along

the way. Well, you're the last person that gets to the doctor, the dentist, you're always

ill on holiday because that's when your body says now I've got your attention,

you don't have any time for hobbies. But on the other hand I was very lucky I had

two children and I had I had a ring-side seat of history because as a journalist you

meet everyone you go everywhere so I didn't have it all but I

had as much as you can possibly have I'm trying to imagine shearing an office with

Keith Waterhouse and Jeffrey Bernard. What on earth was that like?

Fantastic. We were all in a features office at one stage and somebody said there's going to be a union meeting at four and then somebody

else said do you mean we can't play badminton because we did

...