I firstly【B1】______ to write the letter when the producer called because FOOC was about other people’s【B2】______ and【B3】______.

It’s nearly ten years since I wrote the letter that produced such a phenomenal response from listeners to this programme. It started with a refusal. The producer called and asked if I would think of writing a piece about being a foreign correspondent and a father. I said no. I was on paternity leave and overwhelmed with the sleeplessness of early parenthood. I also wondered what on earth I would say. From Our Own Correspondent (FOOC) was my favourite programme, the greatest vehicle for storytelling anywhere on the BBC, and I didn’t see how the arrival of one reporter’s child might possibly engage the audience. Surely FOOC, as we correspondents call it, was the place to talk about our experience of other people’s lives and countries, not to reflect on our own. The producer of the programme thought he knew better. He called again. "Give it a try at least," he said. "Becoming a parent is a universal experience. Just write it from the point of view of a foreign correspondent." I said I would think about it. But I didn’t "think". Instead, one morning early, sitting up with the baby in one arm, I just started to write. Directly to my son. In writing I spoke not just about becoming a father, but also about my own past, about loss and the failure of dreams, about the pain of different children I had met along the roads of war, and about my father and how alcohol had taken him from me.
    Listening back now I see that at the time, he inhabited my life as a ghost, a paradoxical presence, far from me, yet always there. There was just one draft of the letter. No re-writing. And after the piece was done I went back to my paternity leave. And then the letters started to arrive. By the sack load. From a mother whose only son had died on a military exercise in Canada; from a man writing by the light of an oil lamp in a tent in Antarctica, missing his family back in Britain; and many, many letters from those who had struggled with alcohol or seen loved ones die from it.
Much has happened in the nearly ten years since the letter was broadcast. I eventually quit wandering the war zones of the world and I came to live in Britain. And I found my father. He was waiting for me at the end of the longest road of all: one tougher than all the roads I’d travelled in Africa and Asia. For in the years after the letter I found myself gradually becoming lost in the disease that took his life. Alcohol is an occupational hazard for journalists; for me it went from being the comforting, relaxing presence that calmed the aftermath of witnessing bloody violence, to a self-destructive compulsion, that taken to its logical conclusion would have taken my life just as I had seen it take the careers, marriages and lives of good friends and colleagues in newspapers and broadcasting. Reporting war can give us good reasons for drinking, but for some the "reason" eventually becomes the "excuse".
    Our trade is littered with its casualties. I was lucky to stop in time. There were many things that helped: the people I loved, good colleagues, and others who had found sobriety long before me. More than anything though it was the presence of my son, the boy in the letter: his zest for life and his need for my presence gave me the strength I needed. And, as I’ve said, I found my father. In those shivering early morning hours before I quit, in hotels across the world, I think I was touched by some of the pain he knew as alcohol was claiming more of his life and spirit, that steady, incremental departure of hope. And having known that pain I could only feel compassion and that word which we tough, battle-weary journalists of the war zones find so hard to use, love. When I read the letter now, and I remember that morning with the baby asleep in my lap, I see a young father about to start out on the greatest adventure of his life. He doesn’t know that yet, of course. But that child will be the making of him, the saving of him.