By Christmas I had started think of a list of people I thought would be interesting to record conversations with that could potentially inform the main story about Sam, but primarily that would be kept and made available for now and future generations.
I invited Mick Ord with his vast experience to join the project to record these stories. Mick is a professional interviewer and producer and, after many years of running BBC Radio Merseyside, now has his own podcasts and delivers media training across the country.
This element of the project has just started. Although I have selected people who I’d initially like him to have recorded conversations with, we have no pre-determined outcome yet what or where the voices may ‘live’. One thought is that they’re housed within the Cheshire West and Chester council webpages, and another that strands from them could be woven into our story about Sam, could there be a QR code in the book that takes the listener to their accounts of covid? This is definitely something that interests me a lot and we’ll see how that develops.
But now to the saddest part of our story. Shockingly the news came to us over Christmas that the owner had passed away and Sam taken away by the police. If somehow a family member ever reads this we are so sorry for your loss.
We thought that if we could find a home for Sam, then maybe something positive could come from this deeply sad situation. But then we all got stunned with the news that he had been put down.
One of the saddest covid stories I have ever heard, and one that has probably occurred a thousand times over. How many lives have been this profoundly affected by the pandemic that we don’t know about? Directly or indirectly this story highlights the knock-on effect of the pandemic, without it the owner wouldn’t have had to shield and the dog would have been walked and trained, we have no idea how things may have turned out otherwise, but that period of isolation and shielding has shifted the entire course of their history.
It's hard to continue in the same vein that we were originally in, but in some ways we have even more of a duty of care to the story now than before. We hope to do Sam and his owner justice in basing our story on them, creating a legacy that will hopefully resonate with people and dogs everywhere.
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