Changing Lives

In 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...

Education 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 t...

There 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...

Salt 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 par...

Petra 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, wit...

The 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 h...

HMP 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 welcome...

The 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...

Jenny 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.
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In 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 da...

Bouldering 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 commu...

At 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 achiev...

This 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 ravin...

(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 ...

Vulture 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 ta...

Albert 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 co...

Many 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 (c...

In 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, w...

These 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 ...