When I bought a kamado grill (a fancy BBQ), I joined a Facebook group to help me up the learning curve and set the tone when I posted my first question querying what looked like a crack in the fire bowl only to be ridiculed by a lot of men (only men) who told me it was supposed to be there to allow … [Read more...] about The Benefit Of Complication
Loss
An Existential Crisis
How do we deal with the ultimate existential crisis, a fear of dying? What can we do when we can no longer fall back on the tried and tested answer to the majority of anxieties, "don't worry, it might never happen," when you know full well that it will? I seem to have been writing a lot about … [Read more...] about An Existential Crisis
A Practical Death
How do we deal with death when we realise, at the end of someone's life, how little we really understood about them? My father-in-law died this week after a mercifully short illness. He was, in many ways, a difficult man but what he could not make out of an old discarded pallet was unlikely to … [Read more...] about A Practical Death
What Do We Learn From Ourselves?
Do self-knowledge and self-compassion help when it comes to controlling emotions? I'm pretty good at dishing out suggestions but am I speaking from a place of self-knowledge, or is it just all theoretical training? I was asked this week to write a piece for businesses that are trying to … [Read more...] about What Do We Learn From Ourselves?
Maintaining Control
My father-in-law has said quite specifically that he doesn't want to come over for Christmas dinner but my wife hates to think of him alone again after the death of her mother a little over a year ago. My son's girlfriend has decided that she will eat with her mother rather than join us after the … [Read more...] about Maintaining Control