I’ve never really been one for self-help in any capacity. What you can’t get solved over a pint or two and a chat with a good mate is not worth sorting really. And as for self-help books, I’d prefer a Lynda La Plante any day of the week. And so, in this cynical, sceptical and slightly resistant mindset, I found myself signed up for a six week mindful parenting course. Not for a full six weeks you understand, who would be minding my children while I was mindfully not minding them? No,… Read More

Honours and horrors I’ve made a few mistakes this week. The first was to scan the Queen’s birthday honours list. For some strange reason, I follow this every year; it’s a bit like squeezing pimples, it’s not pleasant but people do it anyway. I do it, not to check if I’ve been included, more to see if they can top last year’s inanities. True to form, there’s a ‘Sir’ for a rejected prime minister, baubles for a forgotten pop star, some sportsfolk and whoopee, a ‘cookery writer’ (services to glazed carrots?). Those… Read More

There’s a New Scientist journalist called John Hoyland who invented the term ‘nominative determinism’ for those strange and interesting cases of people who seem drawn to their chosen profession because of their name. He became interested in the subject after hearing of a scientific paper by authors JW Splatt and D Weedon on the topic of incontinence, on the same day as seeing a book on the Arctic written by Daniel Snowman. Some obvious examples include Judge Judge and Doctor Nurse, as well as the music teacher called Miss Fiddle who became… Read More

Choice is the word of the week it seems.  Voting in Ireland about whether or not to permit women to choose to have an abortion in their own home town or to be forced to go overseas for it, and voting here in New Zealand about whether to let everyone choose when they want to die. It seems a no-brainer to me.  I wouldn’t for one moment assume I have the right to make those decisions on behalf of anyone else, when that person is perfectly capable of making their own decisions. … Read More

Looking back Historically, the attitude towards ‘blindies’ in the 19th Century left a lot to be desired. We managed the odd mention in literature as interesting background characters, excluded from the central plot, but in life were largely regarded as charity cases, except, of course, for those shielded by wealth. Academically, then, as now, there seemed to be no shortage of scientific papers on causes and effects, but most lapse into a terminology that render them practically useless as a point of reference to those of us experiencing sight loss on a… Read More