Born in 1954. Chequered career including Lecturer in English, Social Worker and Lecturer in Social Work. Had breaks related to mental health that also meant I worked in social care. Now retired.
How would you describe yourself to someone? If I try and see how I might look, I think I possibly look and sound extravagant, outward going, easy-going and fun-loving, sometimes funny and other times failing to be so in a quite spectacular way. Lol. I am always, when the synapses are zinging, perhaps overly so, … More As I see me!
If you could bring back one dinosaur, which one would it be?
If you won two free plane tickets, where would you go? Piaget insisted that the egocentrism of the child before its cognitive and emotional development was a very complex thing. He bowed to Freud in relation to the possible explanations of a child’s emotional development, preferring to look at how mature cognition, by which meant … More ‘Free’ is a very overused word. The real danger of the continuation of magical thinking into adulthood.
On Not Being His Echo: When one person’s love for another ends what occurs feels like abandonment to the other. Understanding can be slow to follow for that other person until a means of comprehending arises from the process of remembering, repeating and working through the stories that accompanied the lead-up to, duration and end … More ‘On Not Being His Echo’: The old story of Narcissus and Echo is adaptable and its sex and gender characteristics flexible. Such stories help if other more appropriate help (such as talking it out face-to-face) are denied when relationships end.
What strategies do you use to maintain your health and well-being? The idea that health is JUST an individual one is a relatively new one culturally and socially, although it’s roots lie in the Robinsonades, as Marx called the genre including Defoe’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’, of eighteenth century ‘enlightment’ and free market thinking. The idea has … More The illusion of control
What would you change about modern society? There is too much to change to achieve justice and decency in the relationships that human beings have with each other. But in the richer West and North of the globe, one necessity must be to stop the pressure on seeing economic growth as the means to hopeful … More Our hope for the future has to be decoupled from the false promises of economic growth
This blog is the final ONE on Yayoi Kusama and relates to the catalogue of the exhibition at Factory International Manchester Aviva Studios, which I visited on Tuesday 4th July at 11.15 a.m., as part of a selection of the items from the Manchester International Festival. The catalogue is beautiful and the photography stunning but … More This blog is the final ONE on Yayoi Kusama. The catalogue is beautiful, one essay is fascinating: Phoebe Greenwood (ed. 2023.) ‘Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons’.
What do you listen to while you work? Listening has always been a theme of my aspirations in work and life. When I worked as a social worker and as a social work teacher, the answer would have been obvious – if you do work, social work, you listen to the person with whom you … More Is divided attention really listening?
‘ ‘“Tell me a story.” … / “I cannot,” I whisper. I hide my face in your shoulder. I cry. “I cannot lose you.” I pull you closer to me, I cannot lose you after all of our stories. My life is tangled into yours and I fear pieces of me will die with you. … More This blog looks at Ahmad Danny Ramadan (2019) ‘The Clothesline Swing’ and wonders about the therapeutic in the act of storytelling. Info. to @TheDannyRamadan
In an interview in Wired with Christopher Nolan prior to the release of his and Emma Thomas’s film Oppenheimer, Maria Streshinsky cited Nolan speaking in the December 2014 issue of WIRED which the film-director himself guest-edited, this statement: “The relationship between storytelling and the scientific method fascinates me. It wasn’t really about an intellectual understanding. … More Christopher Nolan once said: “The relationship between storytelling and the scientific method fascinates me. It wasn’t really about an intellectual understanding. It was a feeling of grasping something”. This blog examines ‘Oppenheimer’ seen on Friday 21st July (release day).
Dogs or cats?
Which activities make you lose track of time? Since I retired, I have feared losing my grasp on the need to keep learning and exposing myself to new things or revisiting old things in a new way. That isn’t because I want to widen the opinions I am ready to hold but to understand why … More Engaged: Reading and writing
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