I was rung up out of the blue one day by an organisation called ChinaSo to ask if I would be willing to take part in a series they were making, looking at journalists who work in Beijing, and which would be put out on the YouKu streaming web service.

It involved having a film crew following me for a day, recording a typical day in the life of a British journalist. Only trouble was, it was so heavily stage managed that it bore little resemblance to what I normally got up to. But never mind. It was great fun ordering breakfast at an old traditional restaurant on the other side of town that I had never heard of (I always made breakfast at home); having coffee in a coffee bar I had never heard of; visiting parks in the depths of winter and jumping on and off buses and subway trains with a film camera right on my tail... but not one mention or shot of CCTV, where I worked, since permission would not have been granted to film there.