the one-hundred-and-second episode of ventriloquy is dedicated to the community of former residents at Clays Lane, East London.
as happens too often elsewhere on the planet, they have had to make some very real sacrifices in the name of 'the greater good' - in this case, the construction of the Olympic Village for the 2012 Games.
what's shocking about this story - and almost all my fellow fieldtrip participants (from the conference of the British Sub-committee of the International Geographical Union's Commission for Geographical Education) admitted to being shocked and disturbed - was that this was a story not from a forgotten sub-Saharan country, but from the very backyard of one of the most powerful and wealthy countries in the world. Steve's story deserves to be, to the UK, the wake-up call that Hurricane Katrina precipitated in the United States. and, as you shall see in this 107.2 MB download (my largest video download yet), Steve is not black, and he's possibly not a Muslim, nor might he be gay either. in our conversation with him (which i did not record), he expressed himself lucidly and his breath did not smell of alcohol. there were no needle marks on his arms. and, his socks bore the Union Jack.
i won't forget him in a long time.
Show notes:
- Games Monitor
