From Our Home Correspondent 26/05/2020
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the latest programme, Mishal Husain introduces dispatches from journalists and writers reflecting the range of life across the UK.
She begins and ends in Edinburgh. First, the BBC's Social Affairs Correspondent, Michael Buchanan, reveals how a renowned city centre doctor is using one public health emergency - Covid-19 - to tackle another - drug-related deaths among the homeless. Could a notoriously difficult medical and social problem prove amenable to new approaches?
Cabin fever is a literal risk for those living aboard narrow boats at the moment. And while self-sufficiency is a characteristic of those who live afloat, as Lois Pryce has been discovering among users on the Grand Union Canal, their ingenuity is being tested by the relatively prosaic requirements for water and fuel.
It's once again possible for those in England who are looking to move house to visit potential new homes in person. What, though, of those who are already part of a chain with buyers and sellers ready to go ahead? Lesley Curwen, a business reporter for more than three decades, finds herself in just that situation. Will she make her dream move to the West Country or will there be a last-minute hitch?
Foster carers become accustomed to all types of placements. Emily Unia's parents have decades of experience but even so it's been special for them to share the last several weeks with a young boy and his baby sister who arrived just days before lockdown. She reveals how they've all been coping.
And, back in the Scottish capital, Christopher Harding provides an amusing insight into the world of home schooling as his three children adjust to their new teachers and lessons. How do the ambitions of the new staff fare amid the realities of the schoolroom?
Producer: Simon Coates
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.6 | Thank you for downloading from our home correspondent on BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm Michelle Hussein, and our pieces this time take us to the kitchen table of an academic with grand designs for his children's homeschooling. |
| 0:18.0 | We could have told him this in advance, but it doesn't go according to plan. |
| 0:22.0 | We learn about the lockdown experience of a community |
| 0:24.9 | living on narrow boats on the Thames and a foster parents who took in two small |
| 0:30.1 | new arrivals just before the restrictions came in. And as if buying and |
| 0:34.9 | selling a home isn't stressful enough in normal times, try doing it at a time like |
| 0:40.0 | this. One correspondent has lived to tell the tale. First we're in Edinburgh. |
| 0:46.1 | Scotland has the highest level of drug-related deaths in Europe. The latest |
| 0:51.3 | official figures showed that on average more than three people died each |
| 0:54.8 | day through drug misuse. But as the BBC Social Affairs correspondent Michael Buchanan has |
| 1:00.9 | been discovering, lockdown has brought an opportunity, possibly a transformative |
| 1:06.7 | one. |
| 1:07.7 | Nestled amongst half million pound houses on a quiet road about a 15 minute walk from Prince Street is a bold experiment in public |
| 1:16.8 | health, an attempt to turn a global calamity into a local opportunity in an hotel that doesn't want to be named for fear of attracting |
| 1:26.0 | unwanted attention, I found nearly 80 rough sleepers, quickly taken off Edinburgh streets in March as the virus was heading northwards. |
| 1:36.1 | Amid redundant signs for tours of the Highlands and a tall glass cabinet full of hotel essentials such as toothpaste and travel |
| 1:44.2 | adapters a group mainly of men mill about in the reception area often bumping into |
| 1:50.5 | me clearly struggling to practice social distancing. |
| 1:55.5 | The rivalries that often dominate life on the streets for food, money, drugs, safety |
| 2:01.9 | have largely been put to one side. |
... |
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