"We can't start the war yet, Kate Adie isn't here", goes the old joke. Day four into the Iraq conflict and the veteran BBC reporter was in Keswick, topping the bill at a genteel literature festival.

The unfolding horror of another bitter battle is taking place without the clear, clipped, familiar tones which have kept us up to speed from world trouble spots for three decades.

Why?

"It's early days, and who knows where I am going to be in the near future?" she counters.

Kate has just heard that her contemporary, ITN journalist Terry Lloyd, had gone missing while filming the American and British advance on Basra.

"Tomorrow, you will know what happened," she says.

I had asked her to talk about the risks. Visibly shaken by the news of her long-standing friend, she simply replied: "Don't go there".

Terry Lloyd's body was later discovered among 50 corpses in a hospital in Basra. His ITN press card and other papers provided confirmation of his death.

Kate Adie reported from behind a car door during the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980. She covered the Falklands, Libya, the last Gulf War and former Yugoslavian hostilities. In Beijing's Tiananmen Square she was grazed in the arm by a bullet, which then struck and killed a young man standing next to her.

She cried alone in a hotel room, following the atrocities of Tiananmen Square, having seen scores and scores of people killed. But there are no hauntings, or nightmares.

"I am going to say something sexist," she says. "I think women deal with things better than men, because they talk things through. Women come to terms with issues more easily than men.

"At the end of a bad day, I like to grab a drink and unwind. Unwinding means you can bury what you have seen. You say Christ, that was awful', talk about it, and leave it."

Kate has been shot three times. She has shrapnel and a bullet from Bosnia lodged in her toe.

Her regular radio broadcasts are bringing a wealth of experience to the current Iraq crisis. Many think it strange that Adie is not in her usual front line position.

"There are 4,000 reporters in the Gulf in the initial phase, 800 embedded' with the military," she explains.

"There were only a few dozen of us last time. It's all very different now. With 24-hour television, there is a much greater volume to fill."

She will not be drawn on the rights and wrongs of the American and British led offensive to oust Saddam Hussein. Opinions are kept to herself. Kate Adie only deals in facts.

It is said she doesn't suffer fools gladly, that the public's perception of her is fearsome.

Waiting to address an audience at Theatre by the Lake's Words by the Water festival, she is relaxed, elegant, and ready to share selected snippets. Essentially, she is a private person. Interviewers tread carefully, minefields never far from the surface.

Eyes, sometimes cold and calculating, twinkle as she talks of having to kip with 13 men for months in the last Gulf War and the monotony of crawling out of a dirty sleeping bag, to the prospect of no water and no loos, burying tampons and being dirty and very smelly.

"Thank God television cameras can't convey smell," she grins mischievously.

A viewer actually complained to the BBC once, about the state of her hair.

While refusing to discuss her feelings in life and death situations, she did talk about her dread of creepy crawlies.

"We had to dig a latrine in an avocado grove in Rwanda. You had to psyche yourself up to go, the insects were enormous."

One of the greatest risks, she admits, is tiredness.

"I have always taken the view that it is very dangerous to be very tired. You've got to have your wits about you. I was in and out of Bosnia for four years. Sometimes I just had to get out, or I would have been a liability.

"You have got to be ready, and prepared, to face the day. It is all about application and seizing the day."

Her autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, published last year, is exceedingly short on personal detail. Instead, there are tales of fighting, travels by cattle truck and armoured vehicle, descriptions of the turmoil of desert warfare and eccentricities of royal tours.

Adopted into a middle-class Sunderland family, she says she has not had to alter her voice.

"This is how it has always been, short flat A's' into the bargain." She highlights Grasmere as an example. The family regularly used to head to the Lakes for holidays.

Her headmistress had warned nice girls didn't go into journalism, but after studying Scandinavian studies, she headed into local radio - Durham first, then Bristol. She joined BBC TV News in 1979.

A year later, she came to national attention reporting the Iranian Embassy siege. A junior covering a Bank Holiday Monday shift, she worked without a script and broadcast to one of the largest television audiences ever.

Kate grew to love Northern Ireland. She wrote in her autobiography: "It was rare that I felt real fear; in the midst of mayhem, there was always a drop of humanity."

During one riot a window opened, she expected stones, a petrol bomb, or possibly a bucket of boiling water.

"Would youse like a cup of tea?" came a voice.

Kate is known to have had brushes with the tabloids. She didn't like the intrusion after she and her birth mother were reunited, and says the "old trouts versus bimbo" saga was born of misquoting.

Reports came back from Cheltenham Festival of Literature that Kate Adie had suggested TV news stations were going for young beauties with cute faces and bottoms and nothing else in between.

"Tabloids getting it wrong again," she declares, closing the subject with a look capable of turning the recipient to stone.

Sporting her famous pearl earrings, whatever the occasion, battlefield to state funeral, BBC's chief news correspondent has seen life at its rawest and cruellest. Her bravery and tenacity have seen her named twice Reporter of the Year, and winner of the Monte Carlo International Golden Nymph Award. She was awarded the OBE

"Have you been lucky?" I ask.

"Oh," she laughs, "Martin Bell and I have this discussion. He absolutely believes in luck. I say it is an ability to position yourself."

l Kate Adie's The Kindness of Strangers is published by Headline and costs £20.