Sandi Toksvig

Still, I feel that.

I feel very at home in New York.

But it has left me with a great love of arriving anywhere new.

Well, I don't think we had any choice, Richard.

Really?

Again, I must sound like some terrible dinosaur.

So in our house, we had a Reuters ticker tape machine.

Reuters is still one of the great news services.

And a ticker tape machine was a machine that sort of fed the news out and it didn't stop.

It just kept coming.

This chattering machine was in my dad's study.

And it would ping.

It would ping one for quite interesting, two for – and three for invasion pretty much.

That was kind of – so I have never forgotten the night when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia because it just kept pinging threes all the time.

So there was a sense of the news being a backdrop to our lives.

There was a sense of the soundtrack of a ticker tape machine constantly telling us that something was happening.

Plus, Dad never treated us like children.

He just thought we were sort of slightly smaller adults.

I don't ever remember him talking to us as a child.

From about the age of eight, I read the first, me and my brother read the first three pages of the New York Times before supper so that we had something interesting to talk about because, dear God, he didn't want to hear about school.