In the beginning......

Well, this is truly a first for me. I have never done a blog before, never even contemplated doing one before and now here I am starting one. Well, here goes.
I'll tell you a bit about myself before going on to the main subject, a bit of beating around the bush, so to speak. My name is Richard, I am married to Michelle and have three wonderful children aged 13, 11 and 5.
We live in Paignton, Devon, and have done since September 2007. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to start a new life, and jumped at the chance. So we have now been down here nearly three years, and do we love it.
After moving down here, I started my own company, Osborne Cleaning Services, which as the name suggests, is a cleaning company. I specialise on the outside of a property cleaning mainly windows, patio's, drives, decks, gutters and fascia's and conservatories, although I have recently started to diversify into other areas, but more of that later.
What really prompted me to start a blog, was that only a few months ago, I got involved with a local community radio station in Torbay, Riviera FM.
Now, the only experience I have had with radio work was in the RAF. I served as a communications operator during the 1980's, but that was nothing like working on a radio station.
Now I've always been a shy retiring type, very introverted, and never really given to making a spectacle of myself, not whilst sober anyway. So working on a radio station was something I had never before, never even contemplated doing before, ( this is starting to sound familiar).
Anyway, some friends of mine Allan and Maggie have a show on Thursday evenings, in which they invite guests to discuss their hobbies. Interspersed with the chat is a very eclectic selection of music, and the Chemistry between Allan and Maggie is magnetic and a joy to behold, that's probably why their a couple in real life too. Anyhow, I was kindly invited onto the show, and to be honest I was dead nervous. Because Allan and Maggie are good friends, I got into the idea that I was just chatting to them, and ignoring the fact that we were going out live.
Well that seemed to work, because I enjoyed doing the show so much, I decided to go completely against the grain, and try and host a show myself.
Well Riviera FM is a very new station, and at the time there were openings for new presenters. Now, one of the important things about Riviera FM is the fact that all the presenters are amateur's or have done a bit of hospital radio, or have been working as DJs, but I think it is safe to assume that none of us are really professionals. We do it for the love of radio, to give something to the community, or maybe to push our own boundaries. Whatever peoples reasons for doing it are, there is always a good atmosphere when presenters get together.
So I contacted a guy called Martin, who had worked for LWT and the BBC. He is the guy behind Riviera FM, the guy that makes it tick, and the guy that gets things done.
When I first met Martin, I had decided that I wanted to do a Drive Time type programme, with music covering the 70s and 80s, my era. But, after sitting down and discussing this with Martin, we decided to do something different. Anybody can do a music show, the 70s and 80s are well covered on other programmes, and by other radio stations. No, what we decided to do, was something that doesn't get a lot of airplay locally, something that would appeal to a wide audience, and something for young and old alike.
During our chat I mentioned that I had been brought up listening to Country and Western Music, because of my parents love for the genre. Well, that was it, Country it was. And that is how Riviera Country came into being.