Kale, jail and mud Guest editors on Today create an eclectic listen

Radio 4's Today programme has always had its idiosyncrasies. Where else do you find spiritual guidance - Thought for the Day - closely followed by horse racing tips?

- Nell Frizzell

And Christmas is the season for Today's guest editors, who in the past have included Greta Thunberg, Lewis Hamilton, Jarvis Cocker and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Imagine that dinner party.

This year's run on the BBC show has boasted another eclectic mix, starting with the head of science at Nasa Dr Nicola Fox - introduced to listeners by Nick Robinson as "The English girl from Hitchin". Dr Fox was, we heard, lifted out of her crib as a baby to watch the moon landings and the rest, as they say, is astrophysics.

There was a conversation with Carole Mundell, the director of science at the European Space Agency, who described maths rather poetically as "the language that unlocks the universe". An interview with Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran felt like a big treat for Fox but slightly less insightful for the rest of us. Next up, the author Hanif Kureishi, best known for his novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the screenplay for My Beautiful Laundrette, was the second guest editor and had an extraordinary survival story. On Boxing Day last year, he suffered a fall while on holiday in Rome that left him unable to use his limbs. Kureishi described his accident as like "going through a door into a much darker world".