09/12/2012

Available for over a year

Fi Glover dedicates this edition of The Listening Project to a single extraordinary conversation: civil partners Lyn and Mary re-consider their relationship after Lyn served six weeks in Styal prison for drink-driving. Mary, a retired civil servant and Lyn, a trained counsellor, have been together nine years, but Lyn's time in prison has had a huge impact on their relationship and they are now uncertain of their future. With astonishing honesty they lay bare their feelings and reveal problems with which many will identify. The Listening Project is a Radio 4 initiative that offers a snapshot of contemporary Britain in which people across the UK volunteer to have a conversation with someone close to them about a subject they've never discussed intimately before. The conversations are being gathered across the UK by teams of producers from local and national radio stations who facilitate each encounter. Every conversation - they're not BBC interviews, and that's an important difference - lasts up to an hour, and is then edited to extract the key moment of connection between the participants. Many of the long conversations are being archived by the British Library and used to build up a collection of voices capturing a unique portrait of the UK in the second decade of the millennium. You can upload your own conversations or just learn more about The Listening Project by visiting bbc.co.uk/listeningproject This programme was originally broadcast as a Sunday Edition on 9 Dec 2012 Producer: Marya Burgess.