Everything and nothing

Life Changing

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.6 • 735 Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr Sian Williams talks to Paul Mason. Formerly a scientist with Ordnance Survey, he's now a teaching assistant, but the journey from one career to another was impossible to anticipate when he married his German wife Isabel. After a whirlwind romance the two were in no doubt that they wanted to start a family. It wasn't easy. But eventually that ordinary miracle happened. And yet it was a little more than ordinary, because they discovered they were to be parents to triplets. Paul tells Sian both the joyful and harrowing Life Changing events when the children were born, and how the family have since discovered the extraordinary generosity of strangers.

Producer: Tom Alban

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Greg Jenner. I'm the host of Your Dead to Me, where the best names in comedy and history
0:05.5	join me to learn about and laugh at the past. You are a traitor. And in the new series, we'll meet
0:11.2	Aristotle. I think he might have been a time traveller. Someone who's like almost a glitch.
0:15.3	We'll dive into the causes of the British Civil Wars in the 1600s. In England at this period,
0:19.8	there's people can't get on the housing ladder.
0:21.5	This sounds familiar. And we'll discover the arts and crafts movement. I love the clothes. I love
0:26.5	the vibe. Yes, we're a comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it. You're dead to me.
0:31.3	Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:34.3	BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts.
0:41.3	You're about to listen to the latest series of life-changing.
0:45.3	Episodes will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.
0:52.6	Hello, today our story starts fairly traditionally with a couple who fall in love and who
0:58.5	want to start a family, but who know it won't be easy.
1:02.2	And it isn't until that ordinary miracle happens.
1:06.7	Many parents say having a child is life-changing, but for Paul Mason, the birth of his, transformed absolutely everything.
1:14.7	And not in the way you'd expect. He's here now. Hello, Paul.
1:18.6	Hello. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. Good. Nice to see you. This is a story of childbirth, but before that, tell me a bit about yourself and how you came to meet
1:28.7	your future wife, Isabel. Well, I went to University of Aberystwyth and I did a PhD in geography.
1:34.3	And it was my dream job was to work for Ordnance Survey. And so after a period of working as a
1:39.5	scientist, I became a business consultant, an Ordnance Survey. and it's there that I met Isabel. She'd been
1:45.5	working all sorts of places for Microsoft and had joined the IT department, and I was in the
1:50.9	products department, and we happened to be sitting opposite each other, a bit like we are now,
	...

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