Shit happens, but sometimes that's not such a bad thing

Thirty years in business have left me with a highly-developed appreciation of bullshit.

Here are a few pearls for your delectation.

“I’ve glanced through it but need to read your document again at more leisure.”

Translation: “I haven’t read your paper at all, but by all means outline to me what it says, unless you’d like to just cut to the chase and let me tell you what you ought to be thinking.”

“I think this needs a discussion in a wider group.”

Translation: “I really don’t want to take a decision today, so let’s call a meeting for two weeks away and give me a bit of a reprieve.”

“We don’t really think of you as a supplier, more as a partner.”

Translation: “We know that all your clients tell you that they’ll open doors for you to take lots of other sales, in return for a discount, but we really, really will so we’d like a really, really big discount.”

What I hadn’t previously grasped was that as well as bullshit, horseshit is a highly desirable commodity. My wife Danielle cultivates two plots of land with three of her friends. This being the spring, it’s the time to get hold of dung and spread it liberally on the plants. And not just any old dung, apparently, but the well-seasoned stuff. Plants, it transpires, relate to dung like a connoisseur to fine wines: the young stuff may be enjoyable, but real appreciation only comes after it’s aged a bit.

So Danielle and our friend Moira presented me with an enticing prospect this morning. Go and shovel four year-old horse manure into plastic bags and cart them to our allotment. One of the great advantages would be that it would spare me having to play badminton, which is what I’d have been doing otherwise.

You can no doubt imagine how much the prospect attracted me. What better ways are there of spending a Sunday morning?

At the horse farm:
manufacturing plant converting raw material into finished product

As it happened, I was to be cheated of my opportunity to display real virtue. The woman who runs the horse farm had taken pity on her customers, and was offering the alluring stuff pre-bagged.

Shovel the stuff ourselves?
Or buy it at a pound a bag?
So hard to choose

So instead of the joy of shovelling, I simply loaded bags into the back of the car.

My simplified task: dump the bags in the car...

...and deliver them to target

The benefit became particularly obvious when I took a look at the heap I’d have been shovelling otherwise. 

What the task might have been.
Spade, wheelbarrow, back and arms. And what a setting.

It wasn’t until I dropped the stuff off that I at last learned my real lesson. That was when I realised that this ancient horse dung really was as wonderful as Danielle and Moira claimed. I only had to look at how the plants were visibly enjoying it. 

Incipient rhubarb.
Pushed upwards, with obvious pleasure, by the fine material around it

Why, I might even be forced to the conclusion that it’s richer and more beneficial than bullshit in the business environment.

Misty’s Diary: I’m sociable. And on a diet. Damn it

After a bit of a gap, I've managed to unearth another entry from Misty's diary, which I make available below for the general edification of mankind.


March 2014

Who’d be a cat? 

The domestic staff just appal me with their cheek. Why, you should have heard them last night, as they were chucking me out of the room. I mean, getting chucked out is bad enough. Hey, they let the dog spend the night, and all she does is lie on that silly mat of hers and snore. 

When I’m in the room, they don’t just get a presence, passive and dull, they get an experience. I’m genuinely affectionate, so I get right on the bed. Fairness is my middle name, so I make sure I give them both roughly equal time to enjoy the privilege of having me lying on them, and I go to the trouble of making sure I lie on different bits of them at different points of the night. I move around on the bed too, so that the duvet gets a bit of a fluffing up every now and then. 

You’d think they’d appreciate my thoughtfulness. 

What's it for if it isn't for sleeping on?

But no. They prefer to chuck me out. Unbelievable. 

As it happens, I thought they’d miss their opportunity last night, as I shot straight under the bed. Clever, I thought. They wouldn’t find me there. But obviously I had to come out, and the number 2 domestic was waiting. He pounced on me. 

And that’s when they added insult to injury. He made this great groaning sound over picking me up. If you don’t like picking me up, pal, you can just stop. You think I like it? I haven’t scratched you enough for you to get the message?

And that’s when the number 1 domestic added insult to injury. Really stuck the knife in. So disappointing, so treacherous, seeing I think of her as a bit of friend. Reliable, you know. A supporter.

“Careful of your back!” she called out to number 2. “He’s quite a lump, isn’t he?”

A lump? A lump? Me?

And the worst of it? They’ve put me on low-calorie feed! See what I mean about cheek?

See? At least six times my height to get at my bowl
And only to find it's low calorie...

Now, I admit I’m not anorexic. I like to think of myself as sleek. Particularly compared to them: they’re not exactly slim themselves. How shall I put this? Don’t want to call them lumps or anything – I don’t do rude, or at least not like them – but well – shall I just say “high BMI”? And when I go for food, I have to jump six times my height onto a shelf, and I do that just fine, thank you. I’d like to see them make that kind of effort. It’s about as much as they can do slump onto the sofa with their heaped plates of food, to watch TV while they stuff themselves. Pathetic.

To top it all,when they do that, they can’t even make a lap for me. They just sit there gobbling away and watching some bloody silly thriller with subtitles (do they think that a TV series has to be better for being in Italian or Danish? I suppose it does make it more mysterious but, hey, isn’t that something that ought to be left to the plot?)

I don't mind watching the series that actually make sense.
At least this one isn't in a foreign language

No lap means nowhere for me to lie. Which is pretty much the same as chucking me out of the bedroom. How can I show my affection if they don’t let me? And then domestic 2 moans on about me being anti-social.

Anti-social? He whinges about my weight. He chucks me out of the bedroom. He keeps me off his lap so he can stuff his fat face. And then he says I’m anti-social?

Anti-social, me?
Here I am entertaining domestic number 1
and one of her friends

Actually, I like nothing better than company. Unlike him I have real manners. And I’m happy to blend in with others.

Look. I'm even nice to the neighbours

If he’s not getting that treatment, isn’t it perhaps time he asked himself what he’s doing wrong, rather than me?

Archaeology, myth and magic

Stonehenge.
Awe-inspiring construction designed to play with sunlight

There are few sights as awe-inspiring in England as the great circle at Stonehenge, mute testimony of a great civilisation four and a half millennia ago.

Stonehenge is part of a wider area full of neolithic remains, including my favourite, the great circle of unshaped, mismatched stones at Avebury stone circle.

It was during a visit to Avebury some years ago that I was told the story that moved me most about Stonehenge, and about its relationship to another site only a coupe of miles away, at Durrington Walls, sometimes called Woodhenge. As the name implies, it was made of wood which has, inevitably, rotted away leaving only the holes in which the great posts once stood.

Archaeologists have found pottery shards and animal bones in the area, suggesting that eating and drinking took place in Woodhenge – feasting, in fact. That, together with the perishable nature of wood, suggests that Woodhenge may have been a place associated with life, an idea that has been strengthened by more recent archaeology which uncovered the remains of a settlement of nearly 1000 houses nearby, quite a size for the time.

Woodhenge,
reconstructed by Sheffield University Archaeologists

An avenue (cleverly named ‘The Avenue’) leads from Woodhenge to Stonehenge. Stone feels permanent, like death or the afterlife. So the passage from Woodhenge to Stonehenge seems akin to the passage from life to death and, indeed, bones have been found buried at Stonehenge, but no trace of feasts.

So there’s a highly attractive idea that on the death of a prominent person, his or her body might be brought to Woodhenge, for a celebration of the life well lubricated with food and drink, after which the body would be transported towards Stonehenge, the place of stone and of death, for burial.

In other words, the mourners would accompany the dead on the first steps of the passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead, symbolised by the avenue between the henge of transitory life and the henge of lasting death.

It’s speculation of course, but we’re a society that loves our fiction, aren’t we, whether we read it or watch it. So why shouldn’t we go for a story as attractive as this one? After all, it’s plausible and consistent with the evidence. I for one find its charm quite enough for me to accept it, at least until anyone comes along with any evidence to disprove it.

However, why am I telling this story now?

Because I listened yesterday to the most recent episode in the excellent BBC radio series Beyond Belief, dedicated to the subject of Stonehenge. It reminded me for the story of the passage from wood to stone, as an allegory of life to death. But what really made me want to write about it was another remark by one of the experts.

Stonehenge, as is widely known, was built to align with the sun at key times of year, the solstices and the equinoxes. Archways of stone were set up so the light would shine through them and onto the altar at just the right moment. Pretty remarkable stuff in a society without maps, timepieces or astronomical equipment. I hear many people speaking of these achievements in hushed tones of awe-filled fervour.

So I was delighted to hear Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, say of the construction that it was “very cleverly thought out and rather badly done.” It turns out that the main archway, through which the light of sunset at the winter solstice, they dying light of the dying sun, was supposed to shine, was built in a hopelessly unsatisfactory way: one great stone was found for it, but the other was far too short. It had to be set up in too shallow a hole, but since it had a projecting piece at the bottom, a sort of foot, presumably the builders thought it would hold.

It didn’t. It fell and broke, and down came the horizontal slab at the top. So the key element of Stonehenge, its crowning glory, was destroyed through shoddy construction.

Now that story moves me particularly deeply. It brings those distant ancestors to life, and much closer to our lives today. I can just imagine the contractor talking things over with the high priest.

“Well, it’s not as good as having a proper stone, mind. It’s too short, see, it’ll never hold, not in the long term.”

“But it’ll last a while?”

“Oh, sure, it’ll do that. It’ll see you and me out, I’ll warrant. But – a few generations? Maybe not.”

He holds his hand flat and wobbles it from side to side.

“And what’s the alternative?”

I imagine a sucking noise on the teeth.

“Weeeell... That would mean heading back to West Wales... Finding another stone to match the one you’ve got. Dragging it down here, and you know how long it took for the first one... That’d be adding a few years to the project. And as for the budget! You’d have some explaining to do to the chief...”

The high priest looks aghast.

“OK, do the best you can. Use the short stone. Bury it as deep as possible and prop it up. I’m sure it’ll do.”

Which just goes to show that not a lot has really changed in 4500 years or so.

Crime and Vice, Tragedy and Farce, Privilege and Rights

My sermon today draws on two readings. 

The first is from an outstanding figure of British, indeed World, Conservatism, Benjamin Disraeli. In his novel Tancred he wrote “what is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few.”

By way of contrast, the second reading is from one the founding fathers of modern Communism, Karl Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he pointed out that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

I found the Disraeli quotation in Hannah Arendt’s excellent The Origins of Totalitarianism. She uses it to illustrate the curious phenomenon of the acceptance of certain, exceptional Jews in aristocratic and wealthy nineteenth-century circles. In such an anti-Semitic environment, being Jewish was a ‘crime’ in the masses, but in rare, privileged individuals such as Disraeli, it was merely a vice – something that added piquancy, a touch of the exotic, and was consequently more to be indulged than reproved.

Benjamin Disraeli: made his way into society
by stressing his status as an outsider

Disraeli seems to have understood this phenomenon, and although baptised, he affected an appearance to emphasise his Jewish origins, his status as an outsider, not least in his style of hair and beard. 

It worked. Doors opened to him which would have been closed to most people, let alone Jews. He became an MP, the power behind one figurehead Prime Minister, and then Prime Minister himself. And he was the friend of the Queen, his fairytale princess to whom he offered the fantasy title of “Empress of India.”

In passing, he became one of the dominant figures of world politics of his period. Not always for good, it has to be said: he was a key figure in what became the scramble for Africa, which did little for the wellbeing of the inhabitants of that stricken continent.

Now roll forward a century and more. It may not be as serious a crime as Jewishness among anti-Semites, but it’s still reprehensible to smash a shop window deliberately. The law rightly takes a dim view of such criminal damage, as a great many young people in England discovered after the riots of August 2011. 

A slightly different attitude was taken towards similar antics one Oxford night quarter of a century earlier. A flowerpot was flung though the window of a restaurant in the city. However, the young men responsible were not poor, unemployed or coloured. They were members of the famous – or notorious – Bullingdon Club, an organisation that brings together the wealthiest students of the university so that they can enjoy glorious evenings of drunkenness, sometimes capped by trashing the restaurant where they take place.

Who was in the group that particular night? One was Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London. Another, though it’s possible he went home before the restaurant window was smashed, was David Cameron, now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But these are members of the few. The happy few. What’s a crime among the masses is but a vice for them. Youthful indiscretion that shouldn’t lead to long-term consequences. As it clearly hasn’t for Cameron, current leader of the Conservative Party, or Johnson, his leading rival, or indeed George Osborne, another former member of the Club, current Chancellor of the Exchequer and also a contender for Cameron’s crown.

Which brings me to Marx. 

With Disraeli, the crime to be converted into mere vice, was Jewishness. And the man whose privileges allowed him to do it was a political giant.

Sadly, as Arendt points out, making Jewishness a vice rather than a crime has its dangers, however well it worked for Disraeli. A crime is an action requiring punishment, but vice is inherent in personality and, when it loses its charm, it can only be eradicated. The sense that Jewishness is innate was the grounds for the Nazi programme of extermination in the century following Disraeli’s.

A harrowing tragedy.

Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Cameron also enjoyed the privilege of having a crime treated as a vice. They’ve inflicted terrible suffering on the most vulnerable among the masses. But not one of them has yet achieved anything more memorable than their buffoonery in the Bullingdon Club.

A grim farce.

The common thread is privilege. Privilege is a gift to the few which, as Arendt explains, denies the rights of the many.

Which makes me wonder why those of us who lack privilege and depend on rights, persist in voting for any of the farcical lot of them.

Books that Kindle disloyalty

I’m a great fan of reading books electronically. 

Not that I thought I ever would be. I remember long arguments with one of my sons, in which I maintained that nothing would ever replace the facility a physical book, with real paper pages, gives you to flick through it looking for a passage that struck you or which you just want to re-read. 

Well, I was wrong. 

Noble. Majestic. But the user interface leaves a little to desire

It’s just amazing to be able to go on holiday with dozens of books, but without a case that wrenches your arm from your shoulder or makes you liable for excess baggage charges. Indeed, you can stick the whole collection in your hand baggage. You can even carry it in a (reasonably capacious) coat pocket. 

Nor is the experience anything like reading on a computer. On the contrary, today’s electronic book screens manage to create an experience not just spookily similar to that of a printed page, but rather superior to it, at least in clarity of typeface and ease of reading.

Still, there are drawbacks. There are areas where the printed page retains its advantage. One of them, as it happens, comes when travelling. The airlines still don’t let you use your electronic equipment during take-off and landing in. 

Amazing. Are they really saying that we still use navigation systems so vulnerable that a £130 Kindle can flummox them? Are they telling me that terrorists could bring down planes by just having a bunch of them simultaneously phone home from on board?

Cabin crew persist in rigidly enforcing the prohibition of electronic devices. I don’t mind not reading if I’m leaving, or arriving at, a place I don’t know well. In all other circumstances, familiarity has bred contempt, and I want distraction from the instant I’ve sat down to the moment I stand up again. That means I need at least one physical book.

The other advantage of print is that there are simply certain books that have never made it to Kindle or its competitors. And some of those books, whatever the radical modernists may think, are rather good. You want to read them? You have to settle for paper, whose day, it seems, is not quite gone after all.

But sadly I’m beginning to feel disappointed with its limitations. I who was always such a strenuous champion of the joys of riffling through its pages, now frequently catch myself looking for the search function in a printed book, when I want to find a particular passage. It leaves me deflated when I remember there isn’t one. Flicking through the pages is fine, unless you actually have no idea where the passage was.

The sad thing is that I’m finding myself increasingly prone to this kind of electronically-distorted thinking. The other day, studying a map in a London Underground train, I realised I was looking for the cursor that would show me just where on the line I was. And once more had a sensation of disappointment that there wasn’t one.

London Tube Ads: on the way to extinction?

It may be that I was thrown by the fact that even the adverts that line the walls alongside Tube escalators are turning digital now. My grandfather used to print the paper version in years gone by, and he did his work with loving, artistic care, let me tell you. 

These days we increasingly get movies instead of posters, the displays carefully timed so that you don’t miss any of the unfolding action as you move past successive screens. It's like TV adverts even when you're away from your TV. 

The effect is to leave me wondering why, if they can do that, we can’t have a “you are here now” on the Tube maps in the cars.

Frightening. I who strove so long for tradition have been infected by the digital fixation of our time.

It leaves me guiltily uneasy at my own disloyalty.

Crimea: flashpoint towards another war?

I’ve been taken to task by a friend for not backing the obvious will of the people in Crimea, for reintegration with mother Russia. That will was expressed in the referendum held there on Sunday 16 March. The result, we’re told, was a 97% vote in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation.

It seems likely to me that there really is a majority in favour of joining Russia in Crimea, which is 58% ethnically Russian. And I’m in favour of determining this kind of question by the will of the people: if it looks as though a majority of the Scots, for instance, want independence from the United Kingdom, I’d be strongly in favour of their being able to leave, though personally, as an Englishman, I’d dread their going: we’d be stuck with Tory governments for years or possibly decades.

In addition, Kruschev’s cavalier decision in 1954 to hand the region to Ukraine, without logic or reason and certainly without consulting the population, was high-handed and ill-advised. It makes sense to correct that abusive action now.

However, only a year ago, polls showed just 41% of Crimean voters favouring reintegration. And 24% of the population is Ukrainian, while 12% are Tatars, descendants of the original inhabitants, known to be strongly opposed to joining Russia. It seems highly unlikely that many of those groups voted ‘Yes’ on Sunday.

Indeed, even among the Russians, it seems unlikely that the proportion in favour of leaving Ukraine has grown quite so much in just a year, despite local misgivings when the Kiev government of Viktor Yanukovych, ethnically Russian strongman, elected legally though behaving abusively, was brought down.

So the chances that the vote really was 97% in favour strikes me as utterly unbelievable. Especially as no observers were allowed to supervise the voting or the counts. And as we all know, it isn’t the votes that count, it’s who counts the votes.

Besides that, with the Russian Navy still using the peninsula as its Black Sea headquarters, and with its soldiers in the streets – pretending to be local self-defence militias – it’s not clear to me that the referendum in any way represented an exercise in democracy. More of a simulation of democracy under the barrels of a gun. Indeed, the only concession to democracy seems to have been the Kremlin’s willingness to allow that 3% voted against; in Soviet days, majorities generally exceeded 99%.

Guardian picture of Russian forces on Ukrainian territory:
'democratic' muscle for the 16 March referendum

If that’s progress, it only shows how far today’s Russia still has to go.

Even more sadly, however, Putin’s behaviour doesn’t just recall the excesses of the Soviet Union. It recalls an earlier and even more disastrous spell in our recent history. As does the weakness of the Western response to Russia’s behaviour.

In 1936, long before Germany had rearmed, Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, demilitarised by Treaty since the end of the First World War. The democracies protested but took no action.

In the spring of 1938, he annexed Austria to the Reich. The democracies protested but took no action.

In the autumn of 1938, he occupied the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia. The democracies had protested, but instead of taking action, had agreed to allow him to take over those areas. The agreement was the now infamous ‘peace in our time’ document.

In the spring of 1939, Hitler occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. The democracies protested even more loudly but again did nothing else.

Finally, in September 1939, he invaded Poland and the democracies at last reacted. This was the start of the bloodiest conflict in history, the Second World War (well, the European bit: it had been raging in the Far East for several years already).

The question remains, would that have been avoided had France and Britain, even maybe the United States, reacted powerfully to the occupation of the Rhineland?

Putin has in effect annexed Crimea. Now he’s talking about the calls of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine for reunification with the motherland, just as Hitler had justified his actions in Czechoslovakia in the name of the rights of the Sudeten German-speakers.

We’ve probably left it too late to do anything about Crimea. But if we do nothing about Eastern Ukraine, will we just slip further down the same slippery slope that took us to war in the thirties? And might a more powerful response stop that? Say, economic sanctions that bite, even if they cause us pain too, perhaps even the stationing of token troops in Ukraine, so that it’s clear that an invasion would bring Russia into conflict with far more than merely the Ukrainian army?

After all, surely we’ve learned from the Second World War, that the pain that awaits us at the bottom of slippery slopes may sadly be a lot worse than taking effective action now.

The writing process Blog hop

There are invitations I just doesn’t say no to, and one from Faith Colburn, to take part in this blog hop, I was delighted to accept. 

Faith: the smile says it all

Faith writes with wry humour and never-failing optimism. Proud of her status as a sixth-generation Nebraskan, her writing is suffused with the rootedness that comes from so firm an anchor in the soil: raised on a farm, she went back to it after more than a decade away, studying journalism and working for a state game and fish management commission, and was back at the family farm just in time to be driven into bankruptcy by the latest agricultural crisis.

Undeterred, she took a master’s in journalism and went on to work for an organisation providing services for people with developmental disabilities – from which she was made redundant. Again, she returned to university, but this time for employment as well as study: she worked for a research and extension centre, and in parallel took a degree in English and Creative Writing. Her talent was quickly recognised, as she won awards for both the outstanding work of fiction in 2009 and the outstanding thesis in the college of fine arts and humanities in 2012.

She has three sons, a step-daughter, and a step-son.

The wisdom and talent that she’s developed down the years shines through in the two books she has out in paperback and ebook formats, Threshold: A Memoir and From Picas to Bytes, She is currently working on a novel based on the lives of a big band singer and a shell-shocked World War II vet, for the background to which she has drawn heavily on her family history. The award-winning short story, Driving: A Short Story, is available on Amazon.com.

As well as publishing, she keeps us all informed and entertained on her blog, faithanncolburn.com, and on her Facebook page.


She asked me to answer four questions:

What am I working on?

I have two novels complete in draft, and intend to publish one of them later this year on Kindle. Good Company is about the lure on a young man of the world of business, for which he deserts teaching, the fascination of an older woman, who keeps him spellbound and bemused, and the attraction of London over his origins in provincial Sheffield. But behind the glitter, things are less rewarding than he’d hoped, as he finds himself both faithless and betrayed in love, alone miles from home, and facing a work atmosphere which is not merely toxic but ultimately lethal, as death strikes among the senior executives of his company. And the worst part? There’s more than a whiff of murder in the air.

In addition, I keep blogging: five years now, with a Kindle collection to prove it, and working on the next five years.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Hundreds of thousands of people spend their lives in business, but apart from thrillers about shenanigans in board rooms, few novels are based in the everyday lives most of us face in private companies – in my case, for over thirty years. It was time, I felt, to sing of the dramatic events that engulf us too, and why not wrap some love (or possibly just sex) into a thriller about office politics turning fatal?

As for my blog, it’s called ‘Random Views’ for a reason. It touches on anything that catches my fancy, so I hope it keeps a certain freshness even after five years.

Why do I write what I do?

That’s a question plenty of people ask me, though sometimes in its alternative form, “why do you bother to write what you do?” 

The short answer is that I enjoy it and I hope my readers do. There’s plenty out there to bore us  or drive us to distraction; I like to think I create a little oasis which to me feels like sanity, and if anyone else agrees, they’re welcome to share it with me.

How does your writing process work?

With blogs, an idea comes to mind and I work on it. It can take as little as half an hour. It can take as much as four hours. I usually write too long and then have to cut back. I try to put a little sting in the tail.

The worst problem is when I can’t think of a subject. But generally, there’s enough in the news to fill a gap if I have one, and my family, my animals and my reading don’t usually allow one to open up in the first place.

As for novels, I can only say that I’m the opposite of Henry James: he hated writing but loved editing; I wish I didn’t have to edit, but I do. And cut, cut, cut.



My thanks to Faith for having invited me to take part in this exercise.

I’ve invited two others, Lydia Aswolf and Sam Boardman, in turn, to join in. You should visit their blogs just for the fun of it, whenever you want to, but in particular on 24 March when they too will be answering these questions.

Enjoy their writing. And enjoy Faith’s.

Lydia Aswolf: haunting and intriguing writing

Social Media Brand Manager by day and aspiring author by night, Lydia Aswolf knows a thing or two about keeping busy. When she's not on social media, Lydia is behind the scenes lining up great guests on her podcast, Lydia's Literary Lowdown. On the weekly podcast, Lydia welcomes artists from all walks of life to discuss their latest projects, as well as the creative processes that drive them. 

Lydia also writes a weekly blog, on which she writes haunting and intriguing posts in her own distinctive style of blank verse:

It was due to the madness. 
The madness we see every day.
That I discovered what it is.
To grow up glib. 
And like so many things. 
Once knowledge came. 
It couldn’t be spirited away. 

which she varies with profiles and reviews on her podcast. She’s also been interviewed many times herself on podcasts and the websites of fellow bloggers. A former Featured Contributor at Vividlife.me, Lydia loves nothing more than handing out #tweettreats in gratitude to her many followers on Twitter and keeping up with Friends on Faceboook, LinkedIn, and other various social networks. She likes to say “Pop by and chat me up at your peril...” but in fact there are few people it’s more of a pleasure to exchange with, and to read. As she admits herself, if there's anything Lydia loves more than reading, it's chatting with people far and wide. 

Sam Boardman: concentrates on what's right in the human mind

Sam Boardman is a New York psychiatrist at Weill-Cornell Medical College, but as she points out, she’s a lot less interested in what’s wrong with people than in what’s right with them: a few small tweaks, she maintains, can make all the difference.

She regularly administers such small tweaks through her highly readable, entertaining and illuminating blog Positive Prescription – well worth following by anybody interested in the psychiatry of everyday life, including their own. She naturally also contributes to learned journals as well as more accessible media, such as Harper’s Bazar and Huffington Post.

Recently elected a board member at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she explained to website 1stDibs “Our biographies are not always written with a pen. The things we love also tell the stories of our lives, if we let them”, before choosing an inspiring set of objects by which most of us would be more than happy to be defined.

It all feels once more like concentrating on what’s right and not what’s wrong...