Robin Lustig: why I'm stepping down as a BBC presenter Now, I'm called "a veteran." I like to think it means I've been doing it for a long time, but I suspect it really means that I've got old. Just as I was beginning to get the hang of it. I admit I was lucky. If you're going to specialise in reporting foreign affairs, then 1989 to 2012 were, without doubt, the Golden Years. Where do I start? The night I was on shift and suddenly the Berlin Wall was breached and the Cold War was over? October 1990, the day Germany was reunified, and I was perched in a revolving restaurant at the top of the television tower in Alexanderplatz, in what had been East Berlin, surrounded by so many celebrating Berliners and clinking tea cups that barely a word of our broadcast could be heard over the din? Or how about New Year's Eve, 1991, when I broadcast live from a hotel room overlooking Red Square in Moscow, as the Kremlin bells struck midnight and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was consigned to history? There was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait; and the horrors that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia: the massacres of Bosnia and Kosovo, the obscenity of Srebrenica. And one of the most distasteful moments of my career as a broadcaster, when I had to interview, face to face, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, now on trial in The Hague on war crimes charges. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994; the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, and one of my proudest moments: reading the 6 o'clock news bulletin on Radio 4, live from Hong Kong, the only time, as far as I know, that it has been read from an outside broadcast location. August 1997: a Sunday morning, very early. My wife answered the phone, then handed it to me. Robin, Di and Dodi are dead. Can you come in? And then that crazy week when no one understood what kind of a nation we were becoming: crowds in the streets, mounds of flowers outside the Palace, an ugly anti-Royalist mood that seemed somehow to melt away as soon as Elton John had finished singing Candle in the Wind at the funeral. We talked for a time in those long ago Nineties of a "peace dividend," of all the money that governments could divert to other uses now that the Cold War was over and the world was supposedly about to embark on what Bush the Elder had called a "New World Order." And then came 9/11, and everything changed again. This time I was in the kitchen, eating a cheese sandwich, when the phone rang. I recognised the voice, a colleague from the BBC World Service. A plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York - how soon can you get here? And so it goes on. World crisis after world crisis; wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the near collapse of the global banking system; and then the Arab Spring. I feel exhausted just thinking about them. There are countless joys to being a news broadcaster - but there are also good reasons why we suffer from high blood pressure and wake up sweating in the night. I used to have a recurring nightmare in which a guest was ushered into the studio while I was on air and I had no idea who she was. The nightmares stopped when it happened for real - and I survived. There was the time I was due to present a live programme from the Nigerian capital, Abuja. I got as far as the words "Here in Abuja ..." when the lights went out and we lost our connection to London. "Power cut," said the man on the hotel reception desk. Should be back on tomorrow. Or when I was in Brazil, due to interview a very senior former minister live for the BBC World Service. He turned up an hour late, long after we'd finished the programme, having filled the hole desperately with a rather bewildered academic. Sometimes, I couldn't even blame someone else, like when I forgot the name of the person I was interviewing (to be fair, he was in a remote studio in Oxford, so I couldn't see him), and couldn't find the page of the script on which his name was written. Or when I interviewed the ambassador from Azerbaijan, thinking he was from Armenia - or was it the other way round? - during the war between the countries over an enclave called Nagorno-Karabakh. Don't smile, it was a big story at the time. When I started out, we used magnetic tape on reels, and edited it with a razor blade and sticky tape. Now we can edit on our laptops and send our reports by email. We can record an interview on an iPhone and you'd think it was in a studio. If there's a fact or a date I can't remember, a spelling I need to check, or a job title I need to confirm, it's all a mouse-click away. For the past 23 years, I've been trying to make sense of the rapidly changing world we live in. I'm not sure I've cracked it yet, but it's been a lot of fun sharing my curiosity with listeners both in this country and around the world. Robin Lustig will be standing down as presenter of "The World Tonight" on Radio 4 and "Newshour" on BBC World Service in December