Changing Lives
A fortnightly audio plunge into the everyday lives of extraordinary people.
- Update frequency
- every 13 days
- Average duration
- 18 minutes
- Episodes
- 26
- Years Active
- 2020 - 2021
The Secret Gardeners of Southend-on-Sea
Google 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 …
Future Hope: Coping With Covid
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 bee…
Future Hope: The Children
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 oppor…
Future Hope: The Early Years
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…
Hold The Line, Advance The Line or Retreat...
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 …
Petra The Shipwright and The 'Cornelia Anna'
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 ov…
The Curse of Foggy Quay
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 lit…
Posh Bird...Rough Diamond
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 f…
A Christmas Wreath
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 extrao…
Jenny and Her Exoskeleton
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, Lo…
Mind Over Matter
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 exerci…
United We Climb
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 peop…
A Glimpse of Russia
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-win…
The Twilight Journey of the Strolling Conjuror
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 Presiden…
Miss Bayley's Geography Class
(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 hav…
The Circle of Life
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…
Meditations On The Plague
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 imagine…
Laugh Time with Flora
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 …
Your Own Place in the World
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 e…
Every Breath You Take...After
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 ho…