Radio 3 Breakfast - up with the larks

My first fortnight on Breakfast has flown by in a whirlwind of music and excitement. From launching our new daily feature 'Bach Before 7' – which has already proven very popular with listeners – to opening some beautiful and unusual Advent Calendar requests, not to mention busily pinning away at our Musical Map of Great Britain and pondering some big seasonal questions with listeners ('can one be an atheist and truly celebrate Christmas?') it has been an incredibly stimulating and rewarding way to start a new job. Not that there have been no challenges: Nelson Mandela's death just a few hours before only my fifth Breakfast show was interesting, meaning my producer and I had to work out how best to honour, musically, Mandela's spirit ... at 5am. We chose to play a few pieces of music Mandela loved, and even sang himself – such as the folk song 'Shosholoza' – as well as to feature South African artists like Njabulo Madlala and the Soweto String Quartet in a gentle nod to his towering spirit, rather than explicit tribute.

Like any normal human being, I'd been slightly fearful of the daily 4.30am alarm clock – especially as I'm pregnant, so trying to avoid too much caffeine! My normal response would probably have been to drink endless cups of coffee before going on air – but thankfully that hasn't proved necessary (and it's probably meant that I've played a lot less over-caffeinated music than I otherwise might have done!) In fact I'm a real early bird by nature and I've quite enjoyed being up so early every day. The drives through London at that time of the morning are pretty magical and it's helped that it hasn't been arctically freezing! Petroc has a very busy December and January which has given us the opportunity to schedule our rota so that I'm getting quite a few weeks in the studio early on. Then he'll be holding the reins after the baby's born until we settle in to our usual weekly alternating breakfast presenting rhythm once more.

Thanks so much for the warm welcome to breakfast from our listeners: I can’t wait to get back behind the mic next week – listen out for more seasonal music.

• Radio 3 Breakfast
• Clemency Burton-Hill