BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, I'm Michelle Hussein and this is the best of today podcast. Happy New Year.

We've begun 2022 with a program guest edited by Mina Smallman.

She's a former Church of England Archdeacon and school principal.

And in June 2020, her daughters, Nicole Smallman and Bieber Henry were murdered

in a London park. She had to go through a police investigation that was slow, lack of news coverage

of their deaths at the time, and later she reflected on her loss saying that she'd been given a purpose

to make sure her daughter's lives make a change

in the way black women are viewed. She said, in the pecking order of things, we are the lowest

on the ladder. Just before Christmas, I joined her and her husband Chris, close to where Nicole

and Bieber died for a tree planting in their memory.

On the edge of a park in North London this morning,

there's a small group gathered.

There's a copse of trees, and in front of it is a new one,

which is only half planted.

Its branches completely bare now in the middle of winter.

And Mina has just arrived.

She sat down on the bench by the tree and is looking at it for the first time.

Oh, wonderful. Perfect.

Perfect.

How do you feel, Mina, coming here today?

Today it was hard.

...