Where the quest began

WHERE THE QUEST BEGAN

As yet another Inquiry into the Iraq war loomed in the distance I was poking furiously through the news that spawned across the world wide web, the dailies, the weeklies and even what flashed across the telly or trickled in to my head when the radio was on in the hope of striking gold. Now when I say gold, I was thinking more on the lines of a journalistic jackpot, an urn of answered questions that had been cast away either out of ignorance or because it was so shrouded in secrecy that it had been gathering dust and cobwebs in an obscure corner of the media world.

I had to pick a story for an investigative piece of journalism that would become my final MA Project, something that would show what I was capable of as a journalist since I had not really had the opportunity to do much TV or radio presenting while on the course, somehow the local students always seems to be the ones doing that while I ran around in the rain and every other picture of imperfect weather that defines the Yorkshire landscape, trying to get the story. In retrospect of course I see that this only strengthened my resolve to turn out something that would speak, something that would reveal and something that would be exclusive and hopefully take me one step closer to the career I moved halfway round the world to build, the dream I came to this country to pursue. If there's one thing that I am it's determined. Perseverance and resilience make it hard for me to find complacence in mediocrity and this was certainly a time for me to capitalize on those assets.

I had bounced around from the scandals surrounding sex offenders and the ring that had been arrested in Scotland to Mumbai one year on from the Terror attacks which would be an inquisition into the country's enhanced security and whether they were equipped should god forbid another such disaster strike. There were fleeting thoughts on other social and moral issues but the one I finally decided to pursue was the one that I knew would probably be by far the most challenging something I knew that the world would actually want to hear. What I hadn't for seen was how fast the story would move, how it would have been traipsing across the country from Hull and Preston down to Bristol in search of answers and how my insights would find their way into a segment onto the BBC's World Today program