I’m sitting in the Beales Hotel in Hatfield waiting for a Chartered Accountants Benevolent Association course on stress management & wellbeing. I was confused by the course name on the board in reception but I guess a lot of accountants don’t want to admit to anything a prissy as stress. It’s still a macho world. Stress can utterly ruin your health, relationships and life. It doesn’t have to be rational, I get stressed over the most irrational things ever. Being late is my worst, and I get wound up out of all proportion. There are others but they’re probably for another time or place. I guess we all have our coping strategies and that’s why I’m on the course, to develop some more. I’ll update the post with my thoughts … Read entire article »

The other night we watched the 2010 Edgar Wright film, Scott Pilgrim versus the World and it really made me wonder. My early twenties were nothing like Scott Pilgrim or his hipster friends; I wasn’t cool in a nerd way, didn’t play an instrument and definitely didn’t live in Canada. In fact, if you go back to the comic book, Scott Pilgrim, that the film was based on, I was 29 when that came out, so it was a generation different anyway. What the film did do well was generate such an evocation of youth. Particularly with all the video game pinging and imagery. I was a bit gamer in my youth. To say the least. I didn’t have a particularly interesting or awesome childhood, there’s certainly not a lot there … Read entire article »