Gillian Burke: 'I am a product of generations of people moving between continents'

The BBC Autumnwatch presenter talks about growing up in Kenya and Vienna, her family's roots around the world and her love of jumping off thingsWhere we grew up on the outskirts of Nairobi was this very outdoors existence. On a clear day we could see across the north to Mount Kenya. In the holidays my brother, James, who is five years older than me, and his friends had motocross bikes and we used to tear around. We had experiments: testing our parachute-making skills with bedsheets and launching ourselves off the roof. I tended to jump first because I trusted him so much. It was a single-storey house, so no one got hurt.My family moved from Kenya to Vienna when I was 10 for my mother's work with the UN, so I spent my teenage years in Austria. The first thing that struck me about Vienna was I could not believe white people were refuse collectors, emptying the garbage. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Continue reading...