My mom was truly an iconic figure a great journalist and a pioneering woman who died at 54 of cancer without ever having revealed to viewers that she was ill.

I think my love of journalizing my life comes from my mom.

I don't practice but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need.

After I read all the medical journals and watched all the documentaries I still didn't understand the physical sensation of ticking and where it comes from and what it feels like.

Things happened there that I don't think are the finest hours for anybody whether it was a journalist the legal system or in that case of the political system who would say that was an example of when Washington worked best.

Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

The things journalists should pay attention to are the issues the political leadership agrees on rather than to their supposed antagonisms.

When it came to political power blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

We need to recognise that the whole edifice of our fifth estate of our journalism has been built on a foundation of newspaper journalism and that that foundation is crumbling. The management of the media companies will deny that the end is nigh. I hope they are right.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.