Changing Lives
26 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 3 years ago -A fortnightly audio plunge into the everyday lives of extraordinary people.
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Episodes
The Secret Gardeners of Southend-on-Sea
June 22, 2021 16:00 - 22 minutes - 15.7 MBGoogle Maps, for some unknown reason, doesn't show the lovely oasis of the Cluny Gardens Allotments in Southend-on-Sea as green. Don't they realise that the Benedictine monks of Prittlewell Priory gardened there for 400 years until Henry VIII scattered them to the four winds? The current King of the Cluny Gardens is Tony Wagstaff who is a Reparation and Community Practitioner with Southend's ISSP (Intensive Supervision and Surveillance Programme)...and, in ordinary language, a thoroughly...
Future Hope: Coping With Covid
June 09, 2021 16:00 - 21 minutes - 15 MBIn Kolkata in India the virus is spreading rapidly through the city. Many people are out of work and there are many newly homeless families living on the street with nothing to eat. There have been two catastrophic cyclones and widespread flooding in the region. The government is increasingly concerned about what is going to happen to the 'Covid orphans'. In this final podcast about Future Hope we hear from founders, Tim and Erica Grandage, CEO, Sujata Sen, School Principal, Madhu Ra...
Future Hope: The Children
May 25, 2021 17:00 - 24 minutes - 16.6 MBEducation is a human right but one that millions of children are still denied. By providing underprivileged children with an education Future Hope School in Kolkata gives them the key to unlock opportunity; a chance to get a decent job, to escape poverty and to support their families & communities. In Episode 2 of the Future Hope story we hear from three students who are achieving their dreams and also the amazing plans for the future from the founders, Tim and Erica Grandage, and their CE...
Future Hope: The Early Years
May 11, 2021 16:00 - 31 minutes - 21.8 MBThere are 100,000 street children in Kolkata. At the railway stations children on their own take refuge on lit platforms at night, hoping to protect themselves from abuse. During the day they make a few rupees by rag picking, working as coolies or in roadside food stalls. Many are ill and malnourished and often they become addicted to glue, which helps them forget the trauma of their life. Over the past three decades the lives of 3,000 of these children have been transformed by a an extrao...
Hold The Line, Advance The Line or Retreat...
April 28, 2021 12:00 - 15 minutes - 10.5 MBSalt marshes fringe much of the world’s low-lying coasts and they provide the perfect natural defence to the battering of the sea and increasing storm surges as a result of climate change and rising sea levels. A day doesn't seem to go by without news of a further crumbling of the coastline so I thought it would be a great idea to talk to Dr. Ben Evans who is a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Cambridge with a particular interest in coastal wetlands and salt marshes. He grew up...
Petra The Shipwright and The 'Cornelia Anna'
April 13, 2021 16:00 - 19 minutes - 13.1 MBPetra Potasse is a talented shipwright...a rare female in a male world. She lives on her beloved 118-year old Dutch barge, the 'Cornelia Anna', and she sails to where the work is. Since she came over from the Netherlands 13 years ago, leaving a career as an English and Arts and Crafts teacher behind, she has worked on several projects up and down the East Anglian coast as lead shipwright and as teacher and trainer, with the Mayflower Project, to a younger generation of boatbuilders. For...
The Curse of Foggy Quay
April 01, 2021 20:00 - 22 minutes - 15.6 MBThe historic port of Mistley in Essex has been blighted for the past 12 years with a 2-metre high fence which appeared, with no consultation, all along the quay...130 metres. All the barges and little boats that used to come could no longer dock, no more crabbing, no feeding of the swans and the view of the estuary from the old cottages on the quay was forever pixellated. This is the story of how a community fought back. We hear from Nancy Bell, Head Housekeeper of the Grayson Perry ho...
Posh Bird...Rough Diamond
March 17, 2021 17:00 - 17 minutes - 12 MBHMP Warren Hill sits right next to the sea on the Suffolk coast and, in non-pandemic times, it buzzes all day long with activity and purpose. The prison takes residents serving long-term sentences from the rest of the prison system and aims to prepare them for release. They are out of their cells for 12 hours a day. The Vestey Project and the music workshops run by Britten Pears Arts are two of many initiatives that are welcomed and facilitated by the prison. In this podcast we hear f...
A Christmas Wreath
December 08, 2020 20:00 - 24 minutes - 16.8 MBThe last in the current series is this Christmas wreath of flowers, rosehips and bramble foliage entwined together with all the voices, the sounds and the music that have appeared during this extraordinary year. I had no idea that when I called this podcast, back in January, 'Changing Lives', the title would prove so prescient. The podcast suddenly changed completely as it ran along to keep up with events and reinvent itself...interviews moving from homes, offices and community halls to ...
Jenny and Her Exoskeleton
November 24, 2020 20:00 - 18 minutes - 13 MBJenny Hudson was paralysed in a riding accident four years ago but, despite being told that she would never walk again, she is walking with the help of an exoskeleton and a gifted physiotherapist, Louis Martinelli, from Hobbs Rehabilitation in Winchester. The Ekso Bionics company's mission statement is 'we use technology to empower human mobility' and it feels like the potential of the exoskeleton is boundless. 'Sarah you have made me sound rather glorious in this clever podcast which is v...
Mind Over Matter
November 11, 2020 12:00 - 15 minutes - 10.8 MBIn a week when a new vaccine for Covid 19 has been unveiled, this is a podcast focussing on Getting Fit. My doctor daughter broke it to me several years ago that, as we get older, we have to exercise more, and more, and more...it appears it's exponential...especially with the threat of further viruses around the corner. This is a montage of old newsreel and recordings of the really extraordinary Mary Bagot-Stack and her daughter, Prunella, often described as Britain's first 'perfect woma...
United We Climb
October 28, 2020 18:00 - 9 minutes - 6.89 MBBouldering is a relatively new take on an old sport which has boomed in popularity over the past few years. Traditional images of climbing focus on athletic body types, but increasing numbers of people are realising that it offers something for everyone. Yasmin is a paraclimber who's discovered its magic. Indirock is a new bouldering wall on a mission. In their own ways they want to increase diversity within the climbing community and encourage a new generation to discover the sport. You c...
A Glimpse of Russia
October 14, 2020 19:00 - 20 minutes - 14.3 MBAt this time when everything is so uncertain around us, it is pure joy to listen to the recordings of Vladimir Kryuchev in his home town of Sergiyev Posad in Russia. He is an international award-winning audio producer and has just won the top radio prize in Russia for 'The Bots and Spammers Dating Club' but it's his portrayal of his community, his town and surrounding villages, that, for me, is his overriding achievement. Just sit back and enjoy his gentle voice and the touching vision of ...
The Twilight Journey of the Strolling Conjuror
September 29, 2020 21:00 - 14 minutes - 10.2 MBThis first podcast in the 2nd series of 'Changing Lives' is a tribute to a truly remarkable man. Richard Jameson was a brilliant scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, a fêted young actor and President of the Oxford Experimental Theatre Club when he was struck down with extraordinary hallucinations up at the Edinburgh Festival where, instead of acting his character, he became that character: 'Ask a man to play a raving lunatic with method acting and you are asking for trouble. It is so close ...
Miss Bayley's Geography Class
June 19, 2020 07:00 - 17 minutes - 11.9 MB(This is the last episode of Series 1 of 'Changing Lives'. Series 2 will start in September 2020) Children across the world are being taught in a myriad different ways at the moment. Schools are having to reinvent the very nature of schooling. Some are relishing the opportunity and encouraging their teachers to be as creative as possible and some are not. This is one young teacher's story. I include a few short clips from an interview with the Head of OFSTED (the Office for Standards in...
The Circle of Life
June 03, 2020 13:00 - 28 minutes - 19.7 MBVulture populations are being decimated across the world and yet they are essential to the circle of life, disposing of carrion in a matter of minutes and allowing what remains to return to the earth. In India the vultures are crucial in the ancient burial rite of the Parsi-Zoroastrian community but they have all but vanished in the past few years, poisoned by Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug given to cattle. This podcast takes a literal and metaphorical look at the vulture and the ci...
Meditations On The Plague
May 20, 2020 11:00 - 30 minutes - 20.8 MBAlbert Camus' philosophical novel, 'La Peste', is being read voraciously all over the world at the moment. Written in 1947 it resonates with us today in a way Camus would probably never have imagined. In this podcast we hear excerpts of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1957 in which he describes the role of the writer in a world under constant threat by malign forces. As we make the first tentative steps to come out of lockdown and emerge into a world where we will be living with an o...
Laugh Time with Flora
May 05, 2020 11:00 - 16 minutes - 11.4 MBMany people are reinventing themselves under lockdown. So, when an email popped into my inbox 10 days ago inviting me to 15 minutes of smiling, laughing and connecting to boost my immune system and lift my mood for the rest of day, I thought 'Yes...that's exactly what we ALL need' so I made a podcast about it. Flora Wellesley Wesley is a dancer, choreographer, teacher and writer and sits on the council of Equity (choreographers' seat). She is also a founder member of Nora, a contemporary ...
Your Own Place in the World
April 21, 2020 14:00 - 10 minutes - 6.99 MBIn the last week of February the wind blew me in to The Training Flat in Norwich where an eager group of young people were tucking into pizza, some chatting and laughing, some quiet and shy but all engaged. This was a 3-day Tenancy and Independent Living Skills Plus (TILS+) training course to help set them up on their feet in the outside world. The course is one of many invented and run by the social enterprise, Your Own Place, which was set up by Rebecca White in 2013 with the specific ai...
Every Breath You Take...After
April 09, 2020 10:00 - 25 minutes - 17.5 MBThese are three interviews with three remarkable people from my previous podcast who I caught up with to find out what their experience of the last few weeks has been as the corona virus has taken hold in the UK and the whole country is under lockdown. The Breathe Music classes were cancelled two weeks ago and Elmi and Noel are in the strictest form of self-isolation and Linda, who has worked as a specialist respiratory nurse for 20 years, is about to join the team of hard-pressed staff wor...
Every Breath You Take...Before
April 08, 2020 08:00 - 13 minutes - 9.55 MBIn September 2019, when most of us would hardly have been giving a thought to the functioning of our lungs, I went to record a singing session with Breathe Music in Essex. It was a beautiful autumn day. Children were playing in the playground outside the community hall. Nobody had any idea what lay over the horizon. This podcast comes in two parts...Before and After. In the first we hear harpist Mary Anne Barclay who founded Breathe Music five years ago and Linda Leech, a nurse specia...
Now My Love Be Strong
March 24, 2020 19:00 - 27 minutes - 18.8 MBDarren has the charm of the Devil and Lorraine is the love of his life. As I edited their story, I realised I was editing 'West Side Story' cut-and-pasted into the heart of East London. It is a story of love...deep, abiding love, murder in self-defence and 28 years in prison with a life-defining ending. The song 'You and Me' was written by Darren for Lorraine after one visit when she was finding life particularly hard. Performed by Darren and members of band, The Pinnacle, as part of t...
Hereward and the Custard Cream
March 11, 2020 18:00 - 12 minutes - 8.4 MBA stone's throw from the ruins of St. Botolph's Priory in Colchester is an extraordinary shop which bustles with happy people and works some sort of magic on all those who enter there. Here I met Sheelagh Ross and her favourite client, Hereward Brown, art historian with an eclectic interest in all things ancient and a great attitude to life. Let the story unfold... With many thanks to Andrey Vinogradov who has given me permission to use the hurdy-gurdy music from his album 'Distant Calls...
Chile Despertò: a soundscape
February 26, 2020 13:00 - 5 minutes - 3.96 MBThis is a soundscape from two weeks' travelling in Chile just after the start of the 18 October revolution in 2019. They are all sounds recorded on my iPhone in the street, in bars, in Santiago, Valparaíso and the Atacama Desert. The demonstrations continue with the burning down of the carabiñeros' church in Santiago in January and violent clashes between protesters and police on the opening night last Sunday of Latin America's largest music festival in the resort of Viña del Mar. Preside...
Through a Shattered Pane
February 12, 2020 17:00 - 7 minutes - 5.02 MBMusic from 'The Pinnacle' in rehearsal and interviews with band members in their dressing-room after a performance at The South Bank Centre in London. Frank speaking about what music means to them on their journey through prison and now on the outside. 'Since 2012 the Irene Taylor Trust have been running their ‘through the gate’ programme, Sounding Out. The two year traineeship aims to provide longer-term rehabilitative opportunities to previous project participants in order to help bridg...
Sam's Story
January 28, 2020 22:00 - 15 minutes - 10.8 MBThis is the story of Sam in his mother's words. 'Totally brilliant! Have just sat entranced listening.’ ‘What a heartbreaking yet uplifting story.’ ‘A privilege to listen to it.' ‘What a wonderful mother! What an extraordinary woman’