Anybody who's cast even the most casual of glances across the content of this blog would be left in no doubt that I am a Doctor Who fan. It's the enthusiasm of mine which gets written about the most here, which is no surprise because this is a blog about my writing and it so happens that Doctor Who is the subject about which I have found myself most often professionally engaged to write.
(On the subject of which, by the way, thanks to The Doctor Who Show podcast for once again interviewing me, as they did for The Long Game, about my new book. You can hear the interview here if you'd like to know more about the book).
But there other things in life in which I am interested, of course. Not least among them is Formula One Grand Prix motor racing, of which I have been a dedicated armchair follower since I was 11 years old and happened across the 1995 Brazilian Grand Prix on television one Sunday afternoon.
It's not that Formula One has never crossed my path professionally at all. Back in 2014 I was fortunate enough to make a documentary about Ayrton Senna's early career in Norfolk which gained some success, and last year I produced a documentary telling the story of George Russell's first year with the Mercedes team.
More recently, however, I have been helping to look after our weekly Racing Torque motorsport show at work, and at the end of last month this resulted in an incredible opportunity to visit the Oxfordshire headquarters of the Williams Formula One team - one of the great names of the sport, and the team of which I became a fan when first starting to follow F1 in 1995.
This of course resulted in a report for Racing Torque, various other bits and pieces across the station - and, for the first and probably only time, a bylined piece by me on the BBC Sport website. Yes, for this week only, I have been able to have a little bit of a play at being an F1 journalist!
Which is of course immensely pleasing, and another reminder of how very lucky I have been to have this job, and the amazing things I have been able to do through it.
Something else I have done this week which was equally, if not more, pleasing was a piece for BBC Radio Sussex, about my old primary school's 150th anniversary celebrations which I went to last Sunday. After 16 years in the BBC, it was nice to be able to finally do a piece for my "home" station - and in my home village, too, celebrating that school. And if I had been able to go back in time and tell the 11-year-old me who left that school in the summer of 1995 that in 28 years' time he would be writing professionally-published books about Doctor Who and getting to visit the Williams headquarters, on BBC duty for his actual job... Well, I can't help but think he would have felt things hadn't turned out too badly.
Mind you, he would probably have a go at me for not having had a novel published yet... But there's still time!
