Three minutes after ten is the time. It was, I think, the philosopher Edward de Bono, shortly before setting up you two, who first formally framed the idea that there is no point having a mind if you never change it. Some self-important gob on a stick used it several years later as the first line for a book called some, I don't know,

some odd nonsense like how not to be wrong.

But it runs through the time we spend together, like Blackpool through a stick of rock.

I don't know why I get so repelled by the idea of never changing my mind.

I don't know whether it is a relatively recent development.

I can't remember what this show was like when I started doing it. Can you? Well, most of you

can't because some of you weren't born, but you certainly weren't listening. And why am I

mentioning all of this? Well, first of all, because I like you to be fully appraised of what's going on in my bonts before I invite you to ring in with the contents of yours. And second of all, because the producer said something very interesting just before we came on air. We spend our morning, well, we spend a bit of our morning talking about what we are likely to do later on the program, running through the news, working out the difference between something that is going to be a headline and something that is going to be the basis for an interesting conversation.

They are not the same thing.

If I ever did a lecture in radio

phone in presenting, that would be, I think, point one. There is a huge difference between what is a

big and important story and what is a big and interesting topic. You probably don't need me to

describe to you the difference, but there are some stuff, there is

some stuff. You just can't really have interesting conversations about it. You can have conversations.

You can have conversations, but they won't necessarily be interesting. So we spend a little bit

of time every morning working out what will be interesting, what will not, what we find,

what I find personally engaging and why.

And the producer this morning responded to one of our suggestions by saying, well, it's a bit

GCSE debating society, to which I had two immediate responses.

The first was, God, I'm old, It's O-level debating society for my generation.

And the second was, I really liked GCSE debates. I really, really liked six-form debates.

I was, as no doubt have boasted before, a national champion at schoolboy debating.

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