LYSE Doucet was very clear on Desert Island Discs on Radio 4 last Sunday that she is not a war correspondent.

“I don't want to be defined by that horrible three-letter word, war,” the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent told Lauren Laverne, although, as she also admitted, her job meant she often had to report from warzones, most recently Afghanistan.

In an interview that ranged over her upbringing in Canada and her love of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Toumani Diabate, the journalist returned time and again to definitions of what she did. No, Douchet said, she didn’t think she was ever emotional in her reporting from the most harrowing of locations.

“I don’t believe in emotional because that means you’ve lost control of your storytelling,” she argued. “But empathy, I absolutely believe in.”

What does that mean? It means, she said, “I feel no hesitation in taking the side of the children in Syria who were targeted, tortured, traumatised. And I do see my job as a journalist to try to feel a little bit about what they are going through. They are no different from you or I.”

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Desert Island Discs is one of those BBC workhorses that reminds us that a good format will always work. Sometimes I do think the music gets in the way of the conversation, but here it complimented it, particularly when Doucet chose Dawn by The Orchestra of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, composed by the 16-year-old cellist Meena Karimi, a gorgeously moving piece of music that speaks to the creativity of a nation that is seeing the closing down of opportunity under the Taliban.

“Not a day goes by without a new message arriving asking for help to leave the country,” Doucet admitted

But this too will pass, she hoped. “I will go back to Afghanistan because Afghanistan is still part of me.”

Over on 6 Music later the same day Tom Ravenscroft began a new series, Peel Acres, in which he welcomed invited guests into the family home to explore the record collection of his father, the late John Peel.

The first to have the opportunity was Blur and Gorillaz main man Damon Albarn, fresh from being given a dressing down by Taylor Swift on Twitter for suggesting she didn’t write her own tunes.

Albarn was particularly drawn to the DJ’s collection of English psychedelia from the late 1960s, choosing to play records by the likes of Kevin Ayers and Soft Machine.

“Bizarrely, my dad managed Soft Machine very briefly,” Albarn told Ravenscroft. “He took them down to do a gig in the south of France … They were playing on the beach, and he thought it would be a really good idea … There’s got to be a disclaimer with this that it was the sixties … He doused this small bay in gasoline and when they went on stage, he lit it.”

“How long did he manage them for?” Ravenscroft asked.

“Not long,” Alban admitted.

Listen Out For: Rugby Breakfast Show, Radio Scotland, 10am, today. Radio Scotland is very keen on talking about football. I mean, very, very keen. Keen with keen on top. So, it’s quite refreshing to hear rugby getting a look in today as the Six Nations kicks off.