A couple of months ago I started working with a Writing Coach. The criteria for finding the right person was that it needed to be someone whose writing I enjoyed reading, and someone who also had the ability to push my work forwards. Ideally, it also needed to be someone with ideas about writing in … Read more
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, the post I published yesterday about Carl Henry and Half Man Half Biscuit was seen by Carl and he dropped me an email today. Here’s what he said: “Huge surprise to see this appearing as one of your blogs, very many thanks for your compliments I feel very … Read more
Carl Henry has worked for a few years now in Research & Development in the NHS in England. I first met him a few years ago at a conference in Manchester. We chatted over the morning coffee and the conversation turned to what we had been doing the previous weekend. It was a very snowy … Read more
I mentioned in an earlier post about Speed Reading that I am trying to increase the speed at which I read and be much more focused about getting the most out of reading. So far this year I have read 18 books. The pace has gone up in the last few weeks. Of course, some … Read more
Guest Post from June Angela, a Tyke in Exile Today was a very special Sunday, it was a day that we called to see my oldest sister Pat with special needs, 73 years young and now residing in a private nursing home back in our native Yorkshire. She was much greyer than we last … Read more
It began with a promise from my partner, June. She had been on many retreats. I had only been to one weekend meditation retreat 12 years earlier. She wanted me to do a retreat with Lama Lhakpa Yeshe. I asked him if he would help. He offered a 24 hour retreat one-to-one. It took place … Read more
I haven’t written about music for a while, so thought that should be the theme today. Especially after a weekend of Glastonbury wall-to-wall on the TV, radio etc. There was an interesting piece in the weekend Independent by David Hepworth about Glastonbury. He describes it as “merely a version of historical re-enactment”. That’s probably why … Read more
A few years ago I read an inspirational book by Michael Gelb called “How to think like Leonardo da Vinci“. It’s an amazing book to prompt different thinking and increase your powers of creativity. The book came to mind last week as I was thinking through some ideas in the day job. I want to … Read more
In the NHS in England we have had several years worth of initiatives which are designed to encourage innovation. For a monolithic entity that spends £110 billion a year and has 1.3 million staff, the rhetoric around the NHS began before the global economic crash with some approaches which were aimed at encouraging modernisation and … Read more
As promised then, without pause or hesitation. Here is a poem from the third sequence of poems about Blue. In fact, going even further than that, here are two poems. These are the final two poems in the collection. So, it is from this point that I spring forward to the new collection. The indulgence … Read more