Michael BuerkSWINDON FESTIVAL OF LITERATURE: TWENTY-FOUR hour news means that we are instantly transported to the scene of the latest world events.

For many years Michael Buerk was actually at the scene in person, in his role as a foreign correspondent.

He was there when the Berlin Wall came down, when Hong Kong was handed over, as the British task force approached the Falkland Islands and when apartheid disintegrated.

He was on the spot for a number of catastrophes too.

The Flixborough explosion, the Birmingham pub bombings, Lockerbie and Bhopal are all places from which he reported.

And before his rise to national fame he covered Swindon as an HTV reporter in Bristol.

And he seems to have come out of all this with his sanity intact and a healthy disregard for his own talents.

Many of his anecdotes involved alcohol, particularly the one where he had to walk along a busy Bristol street stark naked except for a strategically held cushion.

The tone of the evening swung wildly between such stories and his description of having to eat in Ethiopia in front of thousands of starving people.

The evening was most enjoyable, except for the moment when he described journalists as being vain and insecure, and journalism as a "useless occupation that doesn't require a great deal of talent."

The truth is not always something we need to know.

DAVE ANDREW