There is a lot of loss around. And I’m not just referring to people mourning the loss of a loved person. When someone is bereaved you would expect the mourning. It is natural and understandable. But apart from the loss of human beings, there are many other kinds of losses, and many people in mourning - though few of them would understand their feelings and turmoil as ‘grief’. We somehow want to preserve that label for ‘the big one’. (And some people, of course, would include the death of a pet in that category).
The unacknowledged feelings of grief that people experience surround the many losses that often do not involve the literal death of a body. There is sometimes shock, and anger, and depression surrounding the loss of a job, the ending of a significant relationship, or the onset of a debilitating illness. These are all accompanied by the ending of a particular status and a whole host of expectations and dreams about the future - about what might have been. I sometimes work with people who arrive at my office in a state of shock having recently learned that their partner of 20 or 30 years is leaving. They are almost literally sick with grief - what they thought was the goodness of the past feels destroyed at the time, the present is unbearable, and the future has just evaporated before their eyes.
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Beck’s Cognitive Therapy: Distinctive Features
Despite some £4m a year being spent on homeopathy, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said today that using public money on the highly diluted remedies 
Here’s something. Imagine you live in a community where you are expected to pay into a fund that is used to meet various needs in the community - the upkeep of roads, salaries for nurses and teachers, and community hospitality, for example. Then it transpires that you are about to receive a visit from a dignitary, and custom dictates that you will be expected to meet his considerable costs - the travel and accommodation of his party, and his considerable security expenses, not to mention the disruption and strain on usual community services.
In 1968 the sociologist Peter Berger famously predicted that in the 21st century, religious believers would only be likely to be in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture. In 1710 Thomas Woolstan predicted that religion would be gone by 1900. And many other thinkers (Voltaire, Jefferson, Marx, Engels, Freud) have all anticipated the collapse of religious faith. To the delight of the faithful, and to the chagrin of the faithless, they have all been wrong.
Although it is nearly 24 hours since I watched the first in Channel 4’s new series, 
It is now over 18 months since I first got her - ‘it’ seems way too impersonal for an object which has become an almost indispensable part of my life. I have blogged before about the first love, about speaking to her so that she never forgets (
When you stand back and think about it, it’s really strange. I mean, it may have some side benefits, but the primary activity is odd.
There is a sick theme running through all of this - or at least a clear attempt to involve some form of mental illness, and an attempt to bring in the people in white coats - well, at least psychologists if not psychiatrists.
Apologies for my absence. I’ve been pre-occupied over the ‘holidays’ with a couple of other writing tasks that I needed to complete. Having finished them today I found myself with a few idle hours before returning to work tomorrow and started amusing myself with dreadful similes to tweet.
