What brings you peace? We tend as a culture to fetishise a notion of inner peace, precisely because we live in a world in which both what is good, bad or on some scale between them, are of necessity the product of a dialectic that is necessarily based on conflict. We feel that we have … More Peace in pieces: how searching for and overvaluing peace will always evade it.

What profession do you admire most and why? It is very difficult to admire a profession. Not least because some of the most undesirable aspects of some professions are those characteristics that are most usually given the name ‘professional’. It usually indicates taking a back seat on one’s own emotions or instincts and being driven … More It is still for me the ideal of social work that is most admirable in public life. But is public life itself doomed?

What is the most important thing to carry with you all the time? When I worked as an advisor on anxiety and depression in primary health care, people of all ages would claim that they would never go anywhere without their mobile (and I suppose the same may be said of cell phones in the … More Is my ‘Mobile phone’ the default answer to this prompt? Let’s not choose that, travel light and be truly mobile!

What change, big or small, would you like your blog to make in the world? I am never confident that writing of any kind changes things except in rare cases to change the ways writing itself is practiced. Nevertheless it’s clear that often very unambitious writing can often feel that it has the intention to … More To encourage others to know the desire and feel the will to change

Describe your life in an alternate universe. Human beings get horribly stuck in the notion of binary options when they think of themselves, yet the great thought experiments concerning the identity of things all have a clear message: Schrodinger’s cat is not either alive nor dead but on a continuum of potential states of being … More If there were alternative universes in which to live and describe your life, they would be, and indeed are, MULTIPLE.

What’s the most money you’ve ever spent on a meal? Was it worth it? This is a question you just have to undermine since its presumption is that there is a common starting point for people who answer it, but that is far from the truth, even if we take the fact the cost of … More Use value, exchange value and the sale of social appearances

Describe one habit that brings you joy. A habit, when it isn’t an item of clothing, is usually an action or sequence of actions that is repeated subconsciously because it has been overlearned. Repeated and without variation such sequences are thought to be stored in the cerebellum and are easily accessible without much consciousness that … More Are joy and the habitual really compatible?

What are you curious about? At the beginning of Chapter 2 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we read: ‘”Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot to speak good English); …..’. We forget, at our peril, that, whatever his commitment to nonsense and queer adventures, the eminent … More Curiouser and curiouser! Being Alice in search of inverted worlds in lieu of Wonderland

Write about a random act of kindness you’ve done for someone. A hug, a smile, a giving up Flesh finding its kind in random touch Not seen, not even felt perhaps Except in that touching when Flesh answers in the same kind. And ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ flowers Aloft above its lonely fragile stems of … More Almost flesh, not kind … Akin in ‘we’.

How would you describe yourself to someone who can’t see you? Seeing is an important word in our culture and so it was in Ancient Attica too. In Euripides play, The Phoenician Women, about the collapse of Thebes as it is subject to civil war by Oedipus’ warlike sons, it is associated with people who … More Why is seeing so important anyway? The dominance of the eye. The hegemony of vision. 

Was today typical? There is a distinction in the philosophy of mind between type and token identity. Whereas it was once thought there must be events in the brain the brain that are exactly the same, if expressed in different media, as an event in the mind, like a thought, modern identity theory claims that … More My token day? Why no day need be the same as another.

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!