The Mass Observation with Mum

Introduction Transcript

Hello everyone, this is LEP episode 608 and it’s called TheMass Observation (with Mum).

What’s that all about? You might be thinking. This soundslike some kind of Big Brother thing – like maybe the government observingeveryone in some kind of dystopian future, and somehow my mum is involved init.

Well, I’m afraid it’s far less dramatic than that.

In fact, the mass observation in the title is a socialhistory project that has been going on in the UK, probably for 70 years ormore. It’s a project that my mum has fairly recently got involved in.

Basically, the mass observation (now administered by theUniversity of Sussex) aims to record everyday life in Britain through a panelof volunteer observers who either keep diaries or reply to open-ended questionnaires(known as directives). My mum is one of those volunteers and since this projectis all about collecting information on everyday life in the UK we thought itmight be an interesting episode of Luke’s English Podcast.

So that’s what you’re going to get here. A conversation withmy mum on a variety of topics which have come up in the quarterlyquestionnaires from the Mass Observation.

So, you can expect some rambling conversation between thetwo of us on things like this:

protests

plastic

identity and gender identity

sex education in school

loneliness and belonging

and milk

There’s also some chat at the start about Prince Harry &Meghan Markle, following on from the last time my mum was on the podcast whenwe talked about the royal wedding.

So now you can enjoy about an hour’s worth of my mum’s nicevoice and accent talking about a variety of issues relating to everyday life inthe UK.

I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be back to talk a bit more on theother side of the conversation.

In terms of language learning, your task as ever is to justkeep on listening. At the very least, that’s all you have to do here. Justlisten, follow the conversation, see what you can learn from it and try tonotice any features of English or vocabulary along the way. But the main thing,just enjoy this chat between my mum and me.

Ending

I hope you enjoyed that. I’d like to say a big thank youagain to my mum for being on the podcast again, and to all members of my familywho make a huge contribution every time they’re on.

So what’s up? Nearly the end of the summer holidays. We’reapproaching the end of August.

I hope you’ve had a good summer.

Remember in July I mentioned a couple of times the LEPmeetup that was happening in London? Well, I went to it and met about 25-30LEPsters, had some drinks and conversation with them for a few hours, and what apleasant experience that was!

In fact we recorded some samples of audio during the meetup,with everyone talking for a minute or two. I think I’ll be putting an episodetogether with that.

Speak to you again on the podcast soon! Bye!