Your Holiness

Your Holiness asked me where I'm from.
'South Africa' I smiled.
'Have you ever been there?' It was a question I shouldn't have asked because the South African Government had recently turned down his visa application.
'It's a beautiful country to visit.' I quickly added, trying to take the politics out of my blunder.
'Yes.' he wasn't more specific than that and I still wondered if he'd ever been there.
'You responsible for colonialism', he said instead, grinning back at me cheekily.
'Yes,’ I replied, ‘but I blame it on the folly of my parents generation.'
Of course I was talking about apartheid not colonialism because I'm not even forty yet. And at my age when folk speak about bad things South Africans did it's usually apartheid. Nonetheless, connecting up the circuitry of my family tree to the roots of colonialism was not foremost on my mind. Fixing the audio was a more pressing concern. I was kneeling on the right hand side of the Dalai Lama. Not praying or bowing but preparing to clip a fresh microphone to his robe. The first microphone made a buzzing sound that we hadn't been able to resolve. Your Holiness was sitting on a hotel chair in a conference room at the Inter-Continental in Geneva and we had an exclusive to film him.

A few moments later I was ready to test the new microphone but the Dalai Lama held my hand firm to his knee and waded back to our discussion on South Africa. 'I met De Klerk and Bishop Tutu, the Bishop - a great man like Mandela.'
All this time we thought we were buying time to fix the audio problem. Instead it was the Dalai Lama who was delaying the start of the interview while his attaché prepared his warmer robe. It’s then I realised that giving this exclusive interview to the BBC was as significant to the Spiritual Leader of Tibet as it was to the BBC.