One of my strongest memories of childhood is helping with the hay at a Welsh hill farm called Bodtalog. I remember the scurrying and the squealing of the mice as they sought refuge from the blades of the cutter. I remember the scorching sun, the smell of the hay and the intense joy of being alive. One delicious job was simply to be on top of the hay-cart, arranging the hay as it was thrown by pitchfork to the top of the load.

Bodtalog is a few miles west of Rhayader, off the old mountain road to Aberystwyth and close to the reservoirs of the Elan Valley. There was a time when I knew this area well, riding the hills on horseback and taking part in the life of the local farms. I have distant memories of helping at communal shearings. I recall the long wooden tables where we sat for lunch and the barn lofts where we children stacked the fleeces after the sheep had been shorn.

Of course I am describing a vanished world. We’ve been making hay this past week at Llwyn Ffranc, but there is not a pitchfork in sight. Like everyone else we’ll be making bales. As for the social aspect of shearing, it disappeared from rural life years ago.

I don’t want to indulge in idle nostalgia for the Wales of my youth, but some experiences shape us early on and point the way to the work we are meant to do as adults.

For decades, I left rural Wales behind me and travelled the world as a Reuters correspondent. I found myself reporting on Chad’s civil war, Brazil’s return to democracy after military rule and a host of other stories on four continents. All in all I spent 28 years as a professional story teller and this experience hugely shaped me. I worked with some fine journalists who lived an ethic of engagement with the world. For many Reuters men and women it was more than a job; it was a calling.

I know that some people, looking at my life, see a sharp discontinuity between my journalistic, globe-trotting past and my more static farm-based present. But lived from within, it is a life that has strong threads of continuity. In all my travels I never lost a sense that the Welsh countryside is my home. And once a story teller, always a story teller.