Yesterday’s radio show was another one part-planned for me in advance, which I presented because Paulette is still in Jamaica. I’m very glad I did, because I got to meet an amazing woman.

Lisa Newman works with the Golden Key Project and the IF Group, both of which work with people who have the sort of complex and multiple needs that I was talking about on Monday. IF Group is particularly interesting because it is staff by what I have learned to call Citizens of Experience. That is, the people who have themselves experienced the same life problems that their clients are struggling with. Lisa talked bravely to me about her own struggles with addiction and homelessness.

With my trans activist hat on, I am all in favor of empowering people to help themselves. I’m sick and tired of being told that trans people need help, and that this can only be done by… bunch of weasel words meaning “respectable people”. If you allow yourself to be treated as a victim, you’ll always be a victim. So best of luck to Lisa and her colleagues. Here’s hoping that they achieve great things.

Lisa was with me for the whole of the first hour. You can listen to that here.

We had fewer people around for the second hour than expected, so I ran an interview with Juliet McKenna that I had recorded while I was in Oxford. The full interview is a lot longer and I’ll try to get it on Salon Futura soon. Chopping it down to two 7-minute chunks made it a bit messy, but hopefully it was coherent.

Juliet has an update on what has happened in Brussels this week on her blog. I’ll do a separate post about this.

By the way, I do 7 minute chunks because I have to play music and you can’t always predict what other material you’ll have to include in each 15 minute block.

In the final half hour I chatted to a couple of young people who are volunteering at the station at the moment. Emily is doing A Levels and hoping to study journalism, while Richard is on a journalism course at UWE.

You can listen to the second hour here.

Thanks also to my friend Jackie for popping in and helping out, and to my engineers, Ben and Eric.

The music for the show included Janelle Monae, Amanda Palmer, the great B.B. King, and a whole lot of funk, all produced by Nile Rodgers.

Next week Judeline will be in charge of the show because I’ll be at the Watershed listening to Cory Doctorow explain how information doesn’t want to be free. Tickets are still available. I hope to see some of you there. I’ll be back in the studio on June 3rd, when my guests will include Lucienne Boyce and Kevlin Henney.