Central Park, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, August 2025 This week, I had four unique and separate conversations in completely different settings and within totally different contexts. One was about a challenging work dynamic in a team of highly over- and annoyingly under-achieving individuals, one was about some worrying behaviour of a child that has been spiralling for a while, one was about a relationship breakdown over a historical disagreement both partners simply couldn’t resolve, and one was about...

image ®Shutterstock My friend Katy and I were chatting this morning about this and that and I went into a little moan about my mum. ‘She doesn’t listen, she makes everything about her, she can’t accept how things are changing with age and then she complains when things get too much, she always wants attention but doesn’t give any to me’, you get the idea. My mum is 83 and actually in really good shape. It is just that things are getting a little harder and more tiresome, which she loves...

Picture by Jan Enkelmann, Mysore, India 2005 A while back, I was teaching iheart to a class of 10/11 year old primary school kids. I was called back after a very successful run the year before. Only this time, the stakes felt much higher. I was briefed at length about a long list of problems the children of this year group presented. It was the cohort that had started school during lockdown. Up to the present day, you could still see the implication of that. Delays in language, reading and...