Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

In the latest programme of the monthly series, Mishal Husain introduces dispatches from journalists and writers around the United Kingdom that reflect the range of contemporary life in the country. Â鶹Éç London's Transport Correspondent, Tom Edwards, meets two people counting the cost – literally – of the further delayed London Crossrail infrastructure project and asks if they will be able to survive until it is finally finished. Hannah Moore ruminates on the house move she has just made - her twelfth before she has even reached her thirtieth birthday - and the contrast between her parents’ long settled East Midlands’ life and her own frequently changing one. Richard Vadon takes his teenage son and his friends to a covers band gig - only to find that most of the others there are his age rather than his son’s. But the reason for that reveals much, he says, about the contemporary music scene. After a heart-stopping moment on the cricket field of her son's school - and an emergency operation - Geeta Guru-Murthy considers the domestic costs of intense sporting competitiveness. And while nothing quite prepared author Francesca Segal for her experience of a neonatal intensive care unit not long ago, she now reflects on the lessons it offered her in motherhood and family life. Producer Simon Coates