Last weekend, as I sat on the balcony at a friend’s top-floor apartment, nibbling on homemade pizza and watching the sun go down, the conversation turned to doctors’ surgeries.  “It’s crazy,” said M, an Italian who’s been in the UK […]

If you’re in the UK, you’ll be all too aware by now that we’re having the hottest summer possibly of all time. It remains to be seen whether it overtakes the long hot summer of 1976 as the benchmark. (The […]

My book club recently discussed Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan. She’s an ex-political correspondent on The Guardian newspaper, whose foray into novel-writing has proved hugely successful. This was ‘the Sunday Times Bestseller everybody’s talking about’, it said on Amazon. […]

A while back, I asked a client to supply some information following a conference call. Knowing that putting thoughts down on paper can sometimes make people freeze up, I said that bullet points were fine. They’d then be free to […]

If you’ve ever started a big project (learning a language, getting fit, programming) you’ll know that it’s easy to get discouraged after the initial burst of enthusiasm. The mountain seems so high you can’t even see the snow-capped peak, so […]