Blog

The arrival of lockdown number three has surely come as a surprise to absolutely no-one. Whatever your view may have been on the politics of the pandemic, the one thing that simply can’t be denied is the seismic upward shift in hospital admissions.

By the second week of December anyone with even half an eye on the rapidly growing trend could have foreseen the inevitable evaporation of the de-restricted Christmas we had been promised. 

As sure as night follows day, and just 24 hours after the Prime Minister’s December 18th proclamation that it would be ‘cruel’ to renege on that promise, so Christmas was cancelled. ...

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I was talking to a friend of mine recently about conflict and how people often choose to deal with confrontation and disagreement by offering a non-apology – usually a version of I’m sorry you feel that way.

I’ve written about this before, so anyone who follows my articles and social feeds will know my thoughts on the importance of us somehow (no matter how painful it can feel) accepting responsibility for the way we might make another person feel.   It’s not easy but it’s so healing when you can hear each other.      

The friend I was speaking to – we’ll call him Steve – told me a story.

Nearly...

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Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP)

Definition: A mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse.

Stockholm syndrome

Definition: A psychological response. It occurs when hostages or abuse victims bond with their captors or abusers. This psychological connection develops over the course of the days, weeks, months, or even years of captivity or abuse.

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Two years ago this month, I wrote an article about the current occupant of the White House and the future world of post-traumatic stress that he was wilfully and deliberately creating for migrant families through a policy of enforced familial separation.

I didn’t name him in that article and I have no intention of dignifying him by doing so now.

Recently, that individual has threatened to do what no American leader has done in nearly 30 years and deploy troops to tackle the violent protests that have erupted in the wake George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis last week.

It hardly seems coincidental that when George Bush Sen...

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These last couple of  weeks I found that I own a pair of Fuck-It pants.

This discovery came as a bit of a surprise, because presumably like you and pretty much everyone else in the world who suddenly found the world had irrevocably changed, I had spent the first week of lockdown feeling really fearful about what the post-Covid-19 future might look like.

There was a time in those first few days when I wondered if there would even be a future.

It seemed like one moment it was gin o’clock and then, in the next moment, Armageddon had arrived, coming at full tilt and howling like a banshee.

There is absolutely no d...

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In a world where you can be anything, be kind.

These are not my words. These are the words Caroline Flack posted on her Instagram account in December last year after she was charged with assaulting her boyfriend, Lewis Burton, and the media enjoyed yet another field day at the expense of a celebrity caught in its crosshairs.

The former Love Island host committed suicide in her London flat a fortnight ago, just a couple of weeks before the scheduled start of her trial.

Since her body was discovered and the news broke, social media has erupted into a firestorm of moral outrage at the way Caroline Flack was treated by the UK media, not just in the eig...

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There is very little in this old world that’s truly finite. In most things thetre is scope and opportunity to prevaricate, delay and procrastinate, always with the one-size-fits-all excuse that you need to get your ducks in a row.

Here’s the truth: they never will be.

Even the most industrious and committed among us can find a reason not to start, just as the future always holds a better – and usually mythical – time to begin what you instinctively want to put off.

You’ll buy the dress or the suit or the bathing costume – but you’ll do it when you’ve lost a stone or you’ve toned up with the gym membership you bought on January 2...

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EXT. DAY. BOLIVIA.

Butch and Sundance emerge from the barn at a run, guns drawn. Both fire a couple of rounds.

The shot freezes on them and slowly begins to close in. As it does, we hear the commander of the Bolivian force surrounding the pair’s hideout give the order to fire.

There is a long volley of shots. The firing ceases momentarily before the commander repeats the order to fire. There is another sustained volley of shots, during which the image of Butch & Sundance begins to fade to sepia, and then melts away entirely.

It’s arguably one of the greatest endings in movie history....

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Here’s a statistic for you. If you’re in a room with four friends who are either married or in a long-term relationship and all of them are having sex regularly with their partner, the law of averages suggests your marriage is the one that isn’t getting as much as it should.

Although there’s no definitive study on the subject, anecdotal evidence suggests that between 15 and 20 per cent of all couples are locked into a sexless marriage.

Tempting though it was to write the word trapped instead of locked, we’re being deliberately non-judgemental about this because there’s plenty of well-respected opinion that argues lack of sex doesn’t necessarily make for an unhappy marr...

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Well here we are – the end, as near as makes no difference, of 2019.

Sometimes it’s felt like spending 12 months in some sort of shared experiment involving a mass mental health episode. Barely a day has gone by when, as a society, we haven’t been angry, depressed, riddled with self-doubt, mean-spirited, filled with hatred, intolerant, schizophrenic, phobic and lost.

As years go, this has been one of the more divisive.

It has been dominated by Brexit and political mistrust. It’s been a year of finger-pointing and disruptive direct action on climate change. A time when anti-Semitism and Islamophobia have been evidenced at the very heart of our sys...

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