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The view from on high

April 8, 2026 by bobleckridge

When NASA shared this photo taken from Artemis II I was entranced. I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent looking at this. This is a view of planet Earth which few of us will see with our own eyes, but thanks to the astronauts, all of us can see it. Look how much water there is! I know, 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water, but it still takes me aback to see these great expanses of oceans. And guess what? There are no divisions between one area of water on the planet and another. The great water cycle, from the oceans and seas, to the swirls of rain-soaked clouds which constantly change shape and size, to the streams, rivers and lakes….what goes into the water, flows from one part of the world to all the others.

The second thing I notice are the auroras, one top right of the image, and the other bottom left. In both cases a thin green glow, illuminating just how short is the distance from the surface of the Earth to the airless atmosphere above. There is this incredibly thin layer around our planet, which makes life possible. Compared to the planet herself, this life sustaining layer is astoundingly thin. It looks so delicate. So fragile. Staring at this slip of atmosphere I’m impressed by how, like the water cycle, all of the air we breathe is undivided. What goes into the air at one point on the Earth, quickly spreads around the entire globe.

Nanci Griffiths sings, in “From a Distance” –

From a distance there is harmony
And it echoes through the land
It’s the voice of hope
It’s the voice of peace
It’s the voice of every man

From a distance we all have enough
And no one is in need
There are no guns, no bombs, no diseases
No hungry mouths to feed

and, later, in the same song……

From a distance you look like my friend
Even though we are at war
From a distance I can’t comprehend
What all this war is for

“From a Distance” was written in 1985 by Julie Gold, and recorded by Nanci Griffith for her album, “Lone Star State of Mind”. I heard Nanci perform it in Edinburgh in the early 1990s, and it delights me still. Yet, there is, of course, a sadness there, because all these years on and there are still pathological narcissists flinging bombs, missiles and bullets at people, killing, destroying, and sowing fear and chaos.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Human history tells us that we humans excel at killing each other, destroying habitats, and wiping out whole species. But we are also capable of great art, from the cave drawings of Lascaux, to Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Picasso, Van Gogh, and so on. We are capable of creating the most exquisite music, of writing the most astonishing poems and stories. We are able to invent mind boggling technologies. And, most of all, we are one of the most social animals on the planet, deeply desirous of love, affection and caring relationships.

I look at this photo and I think of all of that. I think, with sadness, of the hate, the selfishness, greed and destruction. I think, with hope, of the kindness of strangers, of the infinite creativity of humans. And, most of all, I think, what a tiny, finite world we all share, spinning on this little planet as it flies, soundlessly, across the universe.

We are well capable of creating a better world, recognising what we share, caring for this planet, and all the marvelous diversity of life living here.

Maybe the view from on high will remind us of that, and inspire us to work to achieve it.

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Wonder and awe

April 8, 2026 by bobleckridge

Episode 2 of my More Good Days podcast is available now, come and subscribe to my substack to receive each episode, free, in your inbox.

Here’s the text, if you’d like to read it……

Are you having a good day? Was yesterday a good day? Whatever your answer, and, yes, I would really like to know about your good day, let’s make today a good day. I’d like to help you do that, and I think the best way for me to do that is to share with you what I’ve learned from my experience with thousands of patients who told me what makes a good day for them, as well as sharing what makes a day a good day for me. 

We are all different. We live according to our own values, tastes, desires, our own relationships and issues, so what goes towards making today a good day for me, may well be different from what makes a good day for you. However, we also have a lot in common, there’s a lot that we share. 

In this podcast, I’ll share with you lots of actions you can take to make today a good day. There are tried and tested principles underpinning these actions. Many of them have been taught through different cultures and traditions over centuries. Some we’ve only discovered more recently. 

You can take any of these principles, try any of these actions, for yourself. Make them your own. The way you apply these ideas in your everyday life will also be unique. That’s great. That’s how it should be. Your day is unique, because you are unique. Nobody else is living, will live or has lived the exact same life as you. We might all be made from the same star stuff, we might all share the same air, the same water, and food produced from the same ground, on this little blue marble of a planet, but there are no two of us who are, were, or ever will be, exactly the same.

When I ask if today is a good day, I know there aren’t just two kinds of days. Good ones and bad ones. Our experiences are much more nuanced than that. Our days are more multi-coloured than that. You may well have some good experiences today, but there might, as well, be some not so good ones, and only you can decide if you’d like to call today a good day. 

In the evening, maybe before you head off to bed, you might reflect on your day, ask yourself, how does it feel? Are you going to call this a good day? If so, why? What particular moments, which specific experiences or encounters made this a good day? 

And if you don’t feel you can call this a good day? Well, why not? What happened today, what experiences did you have that lead you to say that today wasn’t a good day? 

As you think back over the day, even if you conclude it was a pretty crappy one, were there any moments in it which felt good?

You might like to just spend a few minutes on this, this reflecting, this thinking back over the day. 

Why not get a notebook, a journal, and write your thoughts down? These days some people prefer to speak their thoughts, rather than write them and that’s so easy now. Our phones and computers all have easy to use dictation software on them now. So, you could record your thoughts by speaking them into a digital note. Paper, phone, computer, whatever works best for you. The important thing is to make it a habit. Do it every day. Spend a few minutes, reflecting and noting down what made today a good day (or not a good day!)

Remember what we pay attention to, grows. So, my suggestion is to become more aware of what, in your opinion, makes your days good ones, and to spend some time remembering, and so reinforcing, whatever made them so. 

L’émerveillement du quotidien

If there was just one thing I’d recommend to anyone wanting to increase the quality of their everyday life, it would be to nurture a capacity for wonder and awe. 

There’s a French phrase which has appealed to me a lot from the very first time I encountered it – “l’émerveillement du quotidien”. It’s not that easy to translate, because I don’t think any single English word substitutes for “émerveillement”, but the “du quotidien” bit is easy – it means everyday, as in “ordinary”, “typical” “daily” – but the key is the “émerveillement” which contains the meanings of “wonder”, “amazement”, even “awe”. 

I’m fairly happy to translate it as “the wonder of the everyday” as long as that phrase also conveys the idea of “the extraordinariness of the ordinary”. 

The thing is, every single experience we have, we are having for the first and last time ever. Every single experience is unique. Every encounter is unique, just as every person and every relationship is unique. We can get in touch with that uniqueness by stirring up a sense of wonder. 

Actually, the practice of becoming aware of first and last times, is an ancient “spiritual” or “philosophical” practice, which I’ll go into in more detail another time. But, for now, let’s spend a little time wondering about wonder….where can we find the inspirations that make us wonder?

Wonder in Nature

I find natural phenomena to be the greatest source of wonder. I can be amazed at the sight of a butterfly, the colours and patterns on its wings, (astonishingly, the colours in a butterfly wing are mainly produced by the microscopic scales which cover the wing. These scales reflect and absorb light to produce the appearance of colour. I’m not sure I can quite get my head around that). I watch in wonder at the way a butterfly flits from flower to flower, constantly changing and direction. I try to predict which flower they’ll fly to next, and I never get it right. I’m sure I once read that physicists haven’t managed to work out how on earth a butterfly manages to fly that way. As I watch the butterflies I think of how different they are from the caterpillars which they were when they were younger. How on earth does a creature like a caterpillar, create a cocoon for itself, and emerge some time later utterly transformed into a beautiful, butterfly with the ability to spread its brand new wings and fly? 

I can be entranced by the little lemon tree growing outside my front door, now full of buds, then flowers, amazed at the dark, unexpectedly reddish colour of the new growth leaves, delighted at the appearance of the lemons, first as small green globes, swelling and ripening over many weeks to beautiful yellow lemons.  I can lose myself gazing up at the shapes of clouds in the sky, watching them constantly morphing from one shape into another. I can be surprised and captured by the way the petals of a flower catch the sunlight making it seem like they are glowing, looking as if they are shining this energy from within themselves. You get the idea, I’m sure. 

I love to walk amongst the trees, to pause, take deep breaths and smell that cool, slightly damp, woody smell. I delight in the diversity of colours and shapes of their leaves, their blossoms, the sometimes immense girth of their trunks. I think of how some trees have been alive for centuries, and how, despite the fact they don’t have brains, and they can’t move from place to place, they’ve evolved the ability to live on this planet for much longer than we humans can. I think of the scientist, Richard Feynman who said that trees are created out of the air. They take in carbon dioxide and water from the air, and turn it into trunks, branches, twigs, leaves and blossoms. They capture the sunshine for energy and create the oxygen without which every single animal, including humans, would die. You might think that trees get their water from the ground, but, Feynman said, yes, but where does the water in the ground come from? It comes from the sky. Trees really do create themselves from sunshine and air. Isn’t that incredible?

By the way, there is a lot of evidence that spending time amongst trees is good for your health. I’ll tell you about that in another episode.

If you ever browse through the photos people post on social media you’re likely to find plenty of pictures of sunsets. We love sunsets, don’t we? Especially sunsets over the oceans. How often do people gather on beaches, or along promenades to watch the sun go down? One sunset that really made a great impression on me was in the movie, “Le Rayon Vert”, The Green Ray. The film is based on the Jules Verne novel of the same name, although his story is set in Scotland, whilst Eric Romer’s film is set in France. The green ray in question is a rare phenomenon which can occur just as the last of the sun sinks below the horizon of an uninterrupted view across an ocean. The legend, Jules Verne created, was that when someone observes the green ray, they can see into their own heart, and into the hearts of others. 

I don’t live on a coast, but any time I notice the clouds in the sky turning pink as the sun sets, I feel compelled to go outside into the garden, to look up, and just savour the glorious, fast changing colours, in those last few moments of the day.

Meanwhile, which natural phenomena caught your attention today?

Wonder in people

Also, I’m amazed by people. I looked forward to every Monday morning at work because there would be a new clinic, with new patients come to share their utterly unique and wonderful stories with me, and then there would be others coming to relate the changes they had experienced since their last visit. You couldn’t predict what they were going to say, and you never heard an identical story twice. Time and time again patients would tell me about their experiences of trauma, events which had wounded them sometimes which had happened decades ago. Events which shocked and upset me, but which they’d survived. They would demonstrate astonishing abilities to cope and to keep going. Many times I would think, wow, you are an amazing person. Many, many times patients would say to me “You’re the first person I’ve ever told that. I’ve never spoken about it to anybody else”. The fact that we could create such trusting relationships made me feel very, very privileged. I’d hear people say, “You know me better than anyone else ever has”, and I was convinced that meant they now understood themselves better than ever before. 

These comments were common in my place of work. Colleagues had the same experiences. Both during my years as a GP, and my years working at Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, I was privileged to have colleagues who shared a holistic, non-judgemental approach to patients. It really was normal for me to hear my partners and co-workers describe their enthusiasm about such impressive, and even awe inspiring encounters. It wasn’t like that 100 percent of the time. We all had our share of misunderstandings, disappointments, and frustrations. But it happened enough of the time for those days to feel like good days, and for there to be enough of them for us to feel that this way of practicing Medicine was a life worth living. It felt like we were helping to make the world a better place, for one person at a time. 

Wonder in learning

When I was a child my parents subscribed to two part work magazines for me. One was called “Knowledge” and the other was “Look and Learn”. I loved them and looked forward, every fortnight, to each and every new issue . I collected them in especially designed folders, gradually creating my own encyclopaedia. In fact, I was so taken with the range of knowledge, discovery and wonder available in an encyclopaedia, that, at 24, when I graduated from medical school, and received my first month’s pay as a Junior Doctor, I bought a complete set of “Encyclopaedia Brittanica”. I still have it. I know the internet, what with wikipedia, and everything, have made something like that pretty redundant, but I still enjoy pulling out a volume at random and opening it to discover something new to me. It’s the serendipity of these discoveries which delights me. 

You’ll be familiar with the old saying “Every day’s a school day”. It’s often used when something goes wrong, but something we can learn from, or where we suddenly realise something. Insights and understandings are the kind of learning which can thrill me. Those, “aha” moments, where something becomes clear. By the way, learning, it appears, is good for you. People who learn a second language, for example, have been shown to have healthier brains. Maybe it’s the old “use it or lose it” phenomenon, but whether or not that benefit is real, I find that on the days I learn something, I’m more likely to experience that day as a good day. 

When I retired from medical practice in Scotland, I emigrated to France, partly because I was drawn to French culture and French weather, but, also to immerse myself in learning a second language. Twelve years here and I learn a little more French every single day, reading it, listening to it, and having everyday conversations with neighbours. It’s even inspired me to begin to learn more languages, which is a bit of a surprise, because I was never keen on language learning at school. So, if “every day is a school day”, I find that learning is actually a lot more fun now than it ever was back in the day when I was actually a school boy. Learning is a form of wonder for me. I’m delighted and amazed by what I discover. 

Wonder in the human body

When I studied Medicine at university, I was frequently amazed by what I learned about the human body. I remember especially the lectures in embryology, illustrated beautifully in coloured chalks by the Anatomy professor. I was utterly astonished by how two cells, at the very beginning of a human life, a sperm and an ovum, after merging, would double and double, again and again, organising themselves into a complete human being, with arms, legs, a face, and all the bodily organs and systems. All in exactly the right places. It still astonishes me to think of that. 

I was amazed at the healing powers of a human body. How it could knit together a broken bone, seal a cut in the skin, resolve a bruise, or reduce a swelling. I saw how the body did all those things and more, not because a drug had been prescribed, but because that’s what a body does. That still amazes me. 

At seventy years old I realise more than ever just how little we humans can know and understand about life, about this planet we live on, about the universe. I know that I understand much more now than I did when I started work aged 24, but I am humbled by the realisation of how little that is in the grand scheme of things. 

So wonder keeps me engaged with the present day world, and it keeps me humble and open minded. Moments of wonder delight me. They can stop me in my tracks. They bring me joy, a smile to my face, a deep sense of belonging in this incredible world which we all share. They stir a feeling of gratitude, and that’s such an important part of making a day a good day. They make me feel it’s good to be alive. 

I’ve got two poems for you today, both of which have something to say about this sense of wonder.

The first is “Lost” by David Wagoner….

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes behind you

are not lost. Wherever you are is called here,

and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying here,

no two trees are the same to the raven.

No two branches are the same to the wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

where you are. You must let it find you.

This is such a beautiful poem. It’s about presence and the power of Nature. It reminds us of the basic fact of uniqueness, how no two moments are the same. It’s entitled “Lost” and it tells us clearly that when we are feeling lost, we just need to turn our attention to the natural world around us, and feel that deep connectedness which arises when we open our hearts and minds to the living world. 

The second poem is by Gregory Orr…

Ask the tree or the house

ask the rose or the fire

hydrant – everything’s 

waiting for you to notice.

Everything’s waiting for you

to wrap your heart around it.

That music has been playing

since you were born.

You must be mad to resist it.

Always the beloved

surrounds us,

eager to dance.

All we have to do is ask.

Here the poet includes inanimate objects, a house, a fire hydrant. He reminds us that this world we live in is an abundant one. We only need to turn our attention to whatever is around us to become aware of that. And, I think, crucially, he says we need to pay a particular kind of attention….you need to “wrap your heart around it”. It’s Mary Oliver’s “loving attention”. It’s Saint Exupery’s Little Prince learning that what’s most important is what we see with the heart. “That music has been playing since you were born. You must be mad to resist it.”

So, there we have it. My main sources of everyday wonder spring from the natural world, from people, from learning and from the amazing human body. 

How about you? If you do start to note down what makes a day a good day for you, then over time you’ll start to become aware of your own personal sources of wonder, of awe, amazement, and, yes, joy. All of these experiences are likely to create good days for you, and as that becomes your norm, I’m convinced you’ll start to feel, more and more, that you are living a life worth living. As you experience that, as I experience that, as we, and our friends and family experience that, we’ll build the strength, the ideas and the will to make this world a better place. 

Last time I included a poem by Mary Oliver, and this time I’ve read you two poems, one by David Wagoner, and one by Gregory Orr. I think poems engage us in a unique way. I’ve learned that they stimulate and reinforce the part of our brain which is responsible for a particular kind of attention – a broad, appreciative, attention which reveals patterns, connections and the whole to us. I’ll tell you more about that part of the brain in a future episode. But, for now, I’d be really interested to hear from you if you have any favourite poems. Please, get in touch and tell me what they are. I’d like to include them in future episodes, so that we, you and I, can build our own poetry collections to dip into, to savour, relish and enjoy. 

I’ve read that poems were originally music, originally sung. I’ve also read there is a theory that music preceded speech in human evolution. Whether or not that’s the case, there is no doubt that both poetry and music go deep into our souls. I can’t imagine life without them. Well, I can, but it would be a diminished life, a poorer one. 

So, what about music? How much do you listen to music? What kind of music do you like? It’s a fair bet that our musical tastes and preferences are unique to us, but I’d like to share with you some of the music which means so much to me. Because I listen to music every day. I listen casually, playing music while I’m doing something else, but I also listen deliberately, sitting down and paying attention, just to the music. Music can affect my mood, and I’m willing to bet it can affect yours too. A particular song has the power to take right back to a day long ago, in the same way that Proust’s madeleine did for him. In fact, there’s good evidence that music has the power to affect our brain function, improving everything from memory to cognition. I’ll say more about that some other time. 

I have a vinyl record collection which I bought, one record at a time, mainly through my teens and twenties. But I suppose I mainly listen to music these days on streaming services, like Spotify and Youtube. I’ve created a More Good Days playlist on both Spotify and Youtube, where I’ve started to add songs that, I find, contribute to more of my days becoming good ones. Check them out, and let me know if there are any particular songs you’d like me to include. Or make your own playlist, for your own enjoyment. If you’d like to, send me a link to your own playlist and I’ll check it out. 

The easiest way to find my playlists is to use one of the links here – 

Here’s the link to the Spotify playlist – and here’s the link to my youtube one – 

Here are the first songs on my More Good Days playlist – 

First off, I like Days Like This, by Van Morrison. I’ve got quite a number of Van Morrison albums on vinyl and this song is one of my favourites. For those days where everything feels just right.

I was born in 1954 and the first records I bought were by The Beatles. I still play many of their songs, but one which actually mentions good days is “Good Day Sunshine”, a simple song about how sunshine and love can make the day a good one. Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys said this was one of his top 10 favourite Beatles songs.

One Day Like This by Elbow. I love Guy Garvey’s singing voice. Another song about sunshine and love, but with the great line “kiss me like we die tonight” which is spot on for the old “first and last” technique the ancients taught. I also like that Guy sings that one day a year like this would be good enough for him. I know not all days can be good ones, and I sure hope you have more than one every year, but, from time to time, we’ll all have really great days. Just like Van Morrison’s mama told him!

Next up is Lovely Day by Bill Withers. This goes back to the late 70s, and again, sunshine and love are credited for the creation of a good day, but the focus here is really the loving relationship. “Just one look at you and I know….”

I’d never heard of the band Luce until I searched for songs with “good day” in the title, but this is a good one. It also focuses on those themes of love and sunshine, but like Bill Withers song, the loving relationship is the key.

Another song that came up on my search was Good Days by Rodell Duff. I’d never heard this one before either…more sunshine and a loving relationship in play here, but the lines that really connected to me were “so let’s don’t let these Hours and minutes and seconds go to waste, hey ‘Cause these are the good days” which reminds me to reflect on the moments which made today a good one, not least to reinforce them in my life.

Going back to my single buying days, I had to include Thank you for the Days by the Kinks which reminds me of the power of gratitude. I’ll return to that subject, but expressing gratitude for what you’ve experienced today is a powerful psychological practice which contributes to mental health and wellbeing. 

Colin Vearncombe, who sang as “Black”, had a beautiful voice and I’ve long since been a fan of his bit hit with Wonderful Life, which reminds us “There’s magic everywhere”

And, finally, so far, a classic from Louis Armstrong, What a Wonderful World. I mean, this is just perfect, isn’t it? He sings of the natural world, of seeing friends shaking hands and of the miracle of witnessing a child growing up. 

That’s nine songs, and a playlist of 33 minutes. I hope you enjoy all of them, or, at least, some of them!

If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on Bluesky where I post pretty much daily. Just pop my name, bobleckridge, all as one word, into the Bluesky search box and you’ll find me. There’s only one Bob Leckridge! And if you do decide to follow me there, please say hello and introduce yourself. 

I’m just getting started on Substack but you can find this podcast there, you can find a transcript there, and, if you subscribe, you’ll start to receive regular emails from me. But you can also say hello, and introduce yourself there, and if you send me a message, I’ll always reply. 

So, until next time, au revoir et bonne journée, bye, and have a good day. 

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Belonging

April 1, 2026 by bobleckridge

I’m back in the town of my birth, Stirling, this week. My mother in law passed away at the weekend so this is a rather sad, unplanned visit.

Yesterday I decided to walk into town, following part of the route which I used to take to get to work each day for the best part of twenty years. My routine, weather permitting, was to walk from home to the railway station where I’d catch a Glasgow train. In the winter it’d be pitch black over Kings Park, but for most of the year I’d walk through it taking in the long views to the hills, and enjoying the big green space of the park. It was a good start to the day.

Stirling Castle has always been my favourite Scottish castle, but you could say I’m biased, seeing as I was born in Stirling. My gran used to tell me that made me a “son of the rock”.

Seeing the castle again yesterday as I walked through the park, I had a feeling of belonging, a feeling that this is where I came from, but I didn’t feel I’d come home. Stirling has changed a lot over my seventy years on this planet.

My wife’s mum is the last of our parents to go, few relatives still live here, and our old school friends have long since dispersed across the planet, so I don’t recognise anyone as I walk the streets, and no-one recognises me.

I realise it’s the castle, the Wallace monument, the Ochil Hills and the “bens” around Ben Ledi towards the Trossachs which make me feel like I belong.

But it takes people to create a sense of home. People, routine and day after day of everyday wonder.

It strikes me there’s a similar inner experience at work. When we look at photos of ourselves from school days we know “That’s me”. We don’t doubt it. But at exactly the same time we think “Goodness, is that really me?” Because although we have a sense of continuity of the Self, we’re just as aware of how much we’ve changed.

I suppose that’s the nature of change. There’s a continuity within it. The present emerges from the rapidly receding past and we’re already imagining all kinds of possible futures. The flow of time doesn’t break up into neat, separate seconds, minutes and hours, that mechanical view of time is a much more recent invention. For most of history we humans have lived with the rhythms of sunrises and sunsets, and of the cycles of moon phases and seasons.

The philosopher Bergson helpfully showed us the difference between the real lived experience of time which he called duration, and the artificial measured time. Strange that we now let our lives be dominated by the latter over the former.

The long timescales of the mountains and the castle have the power to create this feeling of belonging, despite all the other changes which have dissipated the feeling of this being home.

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More Good Days

March 26, 2026 by bobleckridge

I’ve created a podcast. If you’d like to listen to it come to my Substack page.

Here’s the transcript of the first episode.

“Hello”, that’s what we say when we answer the phone, isn’t it? 

Hello. 

A simple little word we most likely say automatically. It’s kind of a habit, isn’t it?

But we don’t say it only when answering a phone. We say it to acknowledge other people. To connect, even if only briefly. 

When I moved to France I quickly noticed how often people said “bonjour”. Pretty much everyone who passes when I’m out for a walk says “bonjour”. Even teenagers. That was a shock! In fact, teenagers will often say “bonjour, monsieur” which sounds even more polite than just “bonjour”.

I quickly noticed that every conversation starts with “hello”, or “bonjour”, I mean. So, when it’s your turn at the check-out, the check-out man or woman will always say “bonjour” before starting to process your purchases. And you will say “bonjour” in return. It would be impolite otherwise. In a smaller shop, say, a boulangerie, a cafe, or the local post office, people will say “bonjour” when entering the premises. They might say “bonjour, messieurs, dames”, “hello, ladies and gentlemen”, if there are other customers already in the shop awaiting their turn. But, even if there are no other customers, the first thing to say is always “bonjour”. 

I like that. I liked it from the first moment I encountered it. Saying “hello” is an acknowledgement. It’s a way of making a connection. It says, “I’m here and I see, or hear, you”. It establishes a “we”, even if only fleetingly. It makes the world instantly feel a more friendly place. 

When I was a teenager I used to listen to the DJ, John Peel, and I’ll always remember one autumn when he talked about all the leaves that fall on the ground. He said he liked to carry a pen with him. I guess, these days, it would be a “sharpie” or “marker pen”. And he’d stop from time to time and pick up a leaf, write the word “hello” on it and place it back on the ground. He liked to think it would brighten the day of some stranger who’d notice the leaf, pick it up, and read “hello”. 

It’s a small word, and little habit, but, in my experience, it makes the world a better place. 

Hey, that’s a big claim, isn’t it? I mean, it’s just “hello”, for heaven’s sake! 

I can only say, check it out for yourself. How often to people say “hello” to you? How often do you say “hello” to others? Does it seem to make a difference?

That’s a general principle I have – noticing. We’ve got a tendency to live a lot of our lives on autopilot. In fact, my blog, which I’ve been publishing for many years now, is entitled “Heroes not zombies” – you can find it easily by typing heroes not zombies into any browser. I called it that because to address exactly that issue – that we have this tendency to slip into autopilot, living an only semiconscious life, driven this way and that by others, pushed and pulled by circumstances, like zombies. That makes us vulnerable and biddable, with corporations, politicians, and others pushing our buttons to make us respond their will, rather than use our own. But if we wake up, become more aware, pay more attention, then we can increase our autonomy. We can make our own choices, create our own narratives, become the heroes of our own stories. I mean hero in this way. I don’t mean like a sort of super hero with special powers. I mean the main character, the hero, of the story….of your story. 

Over the years I’ve posted articles and shared photos on my blog, all with the hope that others will be inspired to wake up, pay more attention, and resist slipping into autopilot so much. 

So, about this saying “hello”. I’d say try becoming more aware of it. Notice when people say “hello” to you, and grasp the opportunities to say “hello” to others. Then, you decide. Does this help make a better day, a better life, a better world, even? 

In more recent years, here in France, I’ve noticed that there’s another word people are using every day. It’s “bonne journee” – ok, it’s two words, a phrase, not just a single word. But it’s everywhere now, it seems. When leaving the check-out, when leaving the cafe, or the shop, almost always now, you’ll hear, not just “au revoir”, which, by the way, is such a nice way of saying goodbye, because, literally, it’s “until seeing you again”, but, in addition now, you’ll hear “bonne journee” – the French equivalent of “have a good day”. Once I noticed it being used so frequently, I started to use it myself, and it’s my routine now. As I leave the check-out, the restaurant, the boulangerie, I say “au revoir, bonne journee”. 

Actually the French have rippled out this phrase into a whole range of context-specific forms. So, it’s not unusual now, on leaving a boulangerie on a Friday to hear “Bon weekend”, or if you’re there on a Sunday “Bonne dimanche” – “have a good weekend” or “have a good Sunday”. There are loads of others!. 

What I like about this is that it’s an expression of good will. It’s saying to someone else, you wish them to have a good day. 

Well, all that focus on good days got me thinking. What is a good day, anyway? What makes a good day, a good one? And that’s what led to this podcast. 

My hope is, that together, here, we will share what goes to making a day a good day. Because, as I used to say to my patients, you are only alive today, here and now. If you spend all your time in your head going over the past, regretting it, re-experiencing the pains of it, or if you spend all your time in your head in the future, wondering what if this, and what if that? Then your head is filled with hurts, sorrows, anxieties and fears. But what if you deliberately stop that and turn your attention to the here and now? What if you just slow down for a moment and notice what is around you? Not just notice, but pay some attention. Engage. 

Well, then, maybe you’ll start to find some relief. 

Maybe you’ll start to have more good days.

I’d like to help you to have a good day, and I think the best way for me to do that is to share with you what I’ve learned from my experience with thousands of patients who told me what makes a good day for them, as well as sharing what makes a day a good day for me. 

We are all different. We live according to our own values, tastes, desires, our own relationships and issues, so what goes towards making today a good day for me, may well be different from what makes a good day for you. On the other hand, we are all human, and so we have a lot in common. 

I worked as a doctor for four decades, and I’ve often said how I’d look forward to Monday because it was the start of another week. A week where people I’d never met before would come to me and tell me their unique, individual stories. 

I never lost that sense of awe which I’d experience when people told me about their lives. In fact, it wasn’t just the “new” patients I looked forward to seeing. I was just as keen to meet again with those who’d come to me before, maybe many times before. 

We prioritised continuity of care at my place of work. As a patient you could expect to see the same doctor at every visit. It would be unusual if you didn’t. 

This meant we developed long term relationships with our patients, stretching over many months, many years. In some cases, even over different generations. What a delight it was to help a young parent, who’d I’d originally helped when she was just a toddler. Human beings amaze me. Always have done. Still do.

Everyone I met had a unique story to tell. Everyone I met was different. And, yet, everyone I met also had many similar experiences, suffered from the same common symptoms, and manifested very typical patterns of behaviour, and of illness. 

I first expressed the desire to be a doctor when I was three years old. I don’t know where that came from. Nobody in my family had ever worked in health care. I had no relatives who were doctors or nurses. 

I reckon it’s always been a kind of “calling” for me, even though I know that’s not a common word to use about work these days. 

Why did I want to be a doctor? To help people. In fact, I’ve often thought that there’s a purpose to my life….that I’m here to contribute to the creation of a better world. That I’ve a responsibility to try to leave the world a little better place than it was when I entered into it. 

I guess the main way I’ve tried to do that has been one person at a time. If I can help reduce this particular patient’s suffering, if I can help them to heal, to cope better….if I can help them to grow even, then I’m making a contribution to making the world a better place.

We all live our lives a day at a time, and the only place we have power to make a change is right here, right now. So, in this podcast I want to share with you the ways I’ve discovered to help make today a better day. 

As I started to think about what made a day a good day, it seemed pretty clear to me that if we experience more good days, then we might begin to feel that our lives are more worth living. But I don’t think having good days is just about having more happy days. I think it’s about having more days which feel meaningful, valuable, more days where we enrich our relationships and where we grow. 

If more of us have more good days like that, more of us will have the experience of living lives worth living. Then, maybe, we will be able to contribute to making this a better world. 

I have this picture in my head of three concentric circles. Each circle representing a zone of time and space. The innermost circle is where we experience and create the present. 

It’s where we can have our good days. 

The more good days grow in both frequency and intensity, the more they contribute to the creation of the next circle….lives worth living. This is the zone of a lifetime. 

Our lives can feel more worth living, the more good days we have, and the more our lives feel worth living, the more good days we are likely to experience, because in a life well lived there are more opportunities for good days to happen. 

Good days contribute to lives worth living, lives worth living create more opportunities for good days. 

But there is more to a life worth living than is contained within good days, which is partly why this second circle is bigger than the first one. 

We need more than good days. We need more than happy times, enjoyable and rewarding moments. We need to grow, to develop, mature. There’s a French word I love – epanouissement – which means to flourish or to blossom. It’s used to describe what flowers and trees do, but it’s also used in psychology to describe what Jung would call “individuation” – a growing, developing psyche. 

In future episodes we can explore some of the things which help us to grow, to flourish. 

It seems to me that when more of us experience lives worth living, then we will be on track to make the world a better place. That’s the third, outer circle. The zone of the world. 

Nothing exists in isolation. Our lives and our days all occur within particular contexts, specific environments. If we improve these environments, we’re making a better world, and, in turn, we are creating the conditions for more of to live lives worth living. We live in the shared physical, social, and cultural environments, we find in this third, outer circle. We influence these environments through our choices and our behaviours, and these environments, in turn, profoundly influence us. 

A better world will, I believe, be one where we take care to improve these environments. That’s how we will increase the chances of more and more of us experiencing better lives and having more good days. 

One more thing before I begin. I don’t see the world through a binary lens. What do I mean by that? Well there aren’t two kinds of days. Good days and bad ones. It’s not so “black and white”. In every day there will be experiences we appreciate and others we’d rather have avoided. Life is nuanced, and its mixed. 

What we pay attention to gets magnified, so let’s start by paying attention to what makes for a good day. And see where that leads us. 

Here’s to more good days. 

Whatever we pay attention to gets magnified. The more attention we pay to something, the larger it will feature in our minds. Any gardener will tell you the less attention you pay to your plants, the less likely they are to survive, and, in fact, we can say the same about our children. The attention we pay to babies isn’t only crucial for their survival. It literally shapes their brains, influencing both the number of connections created between brain cells, and also the strength of those connections. 

There’s a whole field of developmental psychology devoted to attachment styles….how the kinds of attention paid by main carers shape a child’s personality and behaviour. Patterns which persist right through adult life. 

Paying attention, especially a loving, and caring attention, profoundly affects both survival and thriving. It shapes how we see the world. It lays the foundations for both how we experience and how we interact with the world.

Philosopher and psychologist, William James, described the natural behaviour of attention as “wandering”. That’s what attention does. It keeps wandering. We all have that experience, don’t we?

It’s pretty difficult to keep our attention focused on anything specific. We have to work at it, because attention doesn’t only keep wandering, it’s always on the lookout for whatever is new – a movement, a sound, a characteristic. 

Have you ever noticed how quickly you can spot the movement of an animal, a bird, or a person, when gazing out over even vast landscapes? When something changes in our field of vision, we notice it straight away and turn our attention to it. The same thing happens with sound. It’s not just that we jump, or get startled by sudden loud noises. If we are in an environment where there is a constant background, perhaps machine noise, the moment it stops, we notice it has stopped. We are wired to detect change. To pay attention to what’s new.

The social media giants, mainstream media, and especially the advertising industry all work hard to try to grab and keep our attention. 

One way they do that is by continuously feeding us new things – images, sounds, or information. The invention of “infinite scrolling” where you can never reach the end of a “feed” is one of the most effective, addictive tools they use to keep our attention – to keep our attention on their website, their platform. I read an interview with a software engineer who invented this “infinite scrolling” and he said it was one of his biggest regrets because it has such enormous addictive power.

Apart from noticing what’s new, there’s another way to grab our attention. Stir up strong emotions. 

Just as attention magnifies whatever it is focused on, so can attention change our world by making us angry or fearful. The more we fill our inner experience with anger and fear, the more we pay attention to whatever that anger or fear is attached to. In fact, not only what they are attached to, but the anger and fear themselves, which become all-consuming, setting up our whole being into “fight or flight” mode, with surges of adrenaline, and cortisone, which creates a state of chronic inflammation in the body. What does on in our minds doesn’t stay in our minds. It cascades throughout our entire body, changing it as goes. 

Sensationalist headlines do exactly the same. They aim to catch our attention and keep a hold of it, turning us into anger and fear zombies in the process. 

But we don’t need to live our lives on autopilot. We can make some conscious choices about what we want to pay attention to. We can choose to notice, and to focus in on, beauty, for example. Or we can look out for whatever inspires wonder and awe. 

We can deliberately pay attention to positive emotions, to whatever stirs our souls and makes us feel gratitude for being alive. We can choose to use what the poet, Mary Oliver, called “loving attention”, the kind of attention which generates care, compassion and gratitude. 

Because if we choose to use attention consciously, to choose, in particular, to use loving attention consciously, then our lives and our minds become ever more full of love, wonder, delight, care, compassion and gratitude. 

We just have to practice it, and to practice it every single day. 

In my medical career, I frequently met patients whose suffering was magnified by their attention being trapped in the past, going over and over old wounds and hurts, or by their attention being trapped in the future, imagining all the worst possible outcomes and fearing them. Part of the work of releasing them from their suffering involved helping them to turn their attention to the here and now, where, around us, every day, there are phenomena which can delight and engage us. 

I think we all can begin to experience better lives by, first, becoming aware of where our attention wanders to, and where it gets caught. Only then are we able to make more conscious, personal choices about where to direct it. 

Remember, attention is a great magnifier. It grows whatever it is focused on. So, let’s choose what we want to focus it on. 

How about we focus it on awe, on wonder. My favourite French phrase “L’émerveillement du quotidien” captures exactly that – the wonder, or amazement, of the every day”. What have you noticed today that caught your attention? Did anything stop you in your tracks, or slow you down, to focus on it? Maybe you paused to get your phone out and took a photo. I do that a lot. It’s a great way to slow yourself down, to pay better attention to the here and now, and to give you more chances later to re-visit that moment, to see it again, but with fresh eyes in a different context. And it gives us a chance to share with others what has amazed us. 

Do you use any social media? Maybe you’d like to share some of your photos on Instagram, Facebook, or, in my case, on Bluesky. If you’d like to see my every day photos come and follow me on Bluesky. You’ll find me at this address – @bobleckridge.bsky.social If you do come to Bluesky, send me a message and say hello, so we can connect there. I’d love to see what amazes you every day. 

But my good days aren’t just about what generates awe and wonder. I find that if I decide to focus on whatever delights me, what touches and moves me, then that too helps to create more good days. For me, that includes poetry. I have a little notebook where I copy out by hand my favourite poems, the ones which I come across and which draw me in, move me, inspire me. 

And it includes music, too. I’ll tell you more about that in another episode, and I’d love to hear from you what songs, what compositions, really delight or touch you. Come and find me, either on Bluesky, at @bobleckridge.bsky.social or at heroesnotzombies.com where I’ll post the transcripts of each of these podcast episodes. 

Another of my great passions, which is a huge source of joy, delight, wonder and awe for me, is art. I enjoy seeing what others have created. I love sculpture, especially sculpture outside, in natural environments. But I love a wide range of visual art and always seek out a good gallery or museum if I’m on a city break, or staying somewhere on a trip. Art has incredible power to communicate what we find difficult to put into words. 

I do love words, too, however, and most good days involve some kind of encounter with stories….either the stories of patients, family or friends, of the stories I find in books. I’m an avid reader. 

I don’t know how many of these activities you identify with, but I’d love to hear about your own examples. In the podcast episodes to come, I’ll share with you examples of all of these, and more. 

When it comes right down to it, I recommend we focus on whatever it is that stirs our souls, whatever it is that generates feelings of gratitude and love. That way, I’m pretty sure, we’ll have more good days, more of us will experience our lives as worth living, and together we can create a better world. 

Let me finish today with a Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day”. 

The music I play as an intro and an outro is “What a Wonderful Day” by Shane Ivers. Here’s the credit – Music: What A Wonderful Day by Shane Ivers – https://www.silvermansound.com

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No actors, only mechanisms

March 1, 2026 by bobleckridge

In Jenny Odell’s “Saving Time” she criticises the term “Anthropocene” and writes – 

“A history with no actors, only mechanisms”

That phrase stopped me in my tracks. Isn’t this also a perspective we could take on contemporary Health Care – a system “with no actors, only mechanisms.”?

“Agenda for Change”, a management led sweeping reform of job descriptions and contracts was applied to all but medical staff in the Scottish NHS. It involved breaking the daily work of employees (mainly nurses and admin staff) into tasks with the defined knowledge and skills required to carry them out. Once written into the job descriptions and contracts the human beings actually performing the tasks became invisible. Only the knowledge and skills to do the tasks are important. The tasks take first place, who carries them out becomes irrelevant. The process resulted in many staff finding their posts had been downgraded, and, later, that less highly trained, less well paid staff, trained to do specific tasks, were employed to take over much of the work. The concept of the nursing professional, trained and experienced to conduct her or himself with much day to day autonomy in clinical decision making, was eroded. The posts became interchangeable, more minutely monitored, measured and controlled. The “mechanism” became more important than the “actors”. 

“Lean Management” techniques, developed in factories and offices, where daily work is broken down into processes and events each of which can be measured and controlled in the interest of “efficiency” were rolled out, with no interest whatsoever in either individual patients or the doctor-patient relationships. It didn’t matter who cared for a particular patient, as long as they carried out the necessary tasks with the prerequisite knowledge and skills. The efficiency of the Service is now measured in terms of numbers – numbers of patients treated each year, numbers of “clinical events” carried out by each member of staff, daily, numbers of various tasks “completed”. In the ward where I worked, where there had never been a case of “hospital acquired infection” or a patient who developed “bed sores”, the nurses had to report the zero number of cases of each of these problems every month to their managers, and to create and display a graph showing the zero number, a straight line, running through a number of months. Concepts like “continuity of care” have been eroded. When my dad was admitted to hospital in the terminal phase of his cancer, I found myself thinking, “Why is it that every single doctor, and every single nurse, I ask about his condition, replies that he is not their patient but they will consult his records and get back to me?” And while visiting another relative in a different hospital I overheard one member of staff ask another if they’d “taken the blood from bed 14, yet?” Good luck getting blood out of a bed, I thought. To be fair, this substitution of patients’ names by their bed numbers was a practice which I’d encountered way back in the 1970s as a medical student where we’d be sent to “listen to the heart murmur” or “feel the enlarged liver” in Ward 3…..”no actors, only mechanisms”.

It’s also a long established fact that a disease centred approach is used both in medical education and in clinical practice. Hospitals and clinics are organised along disease centred lines, with departments of specialisms from Cardiology to Dermatology, Renal Medicine, Endocrinology etc. The disease and the systems of treatment structure the entire institution, irrespective of individuals with multiple comorbidities. As the numbers of people living with three or more chronic diseases rises, more and more people experience their care divided between several different hospital departments, each with their own appointment systems, processes and ever changing staff. General Practice used to be the counter to all this, with both training and practice founded on patient centred, holistic principles, but the same principles applied in hospitals have infiltrated General Practice, with the development of disease-centred clinics within each Practice, and an increasing number of doctors working on limited term salaried contracts, or as locums. None of my relatives can tell me the name of “their GP” any more. Instead, they are encouraged to seek telephone assistance from NHS call centres staffed by people they will never know, and directed to see certain doctors, “specialist nurses” or “assistants” depending on their disease and circumstances. People who they don’t know, and may never encounter every again…..”no actors, only mechanisms”.

An additional systems first approach has become the dominant philosophy in health care – “Evidence Based Medicine” (EBM), based on the statistical analyses of experimental trials. Randomised Control Trials, the “gold standard” of EBM are designed to make the human participants irrelevant. The actual humans involved – the experimental subjects and the prescribers – are “controlled for” – they aren’t named. They don’t exist as anything other than collections of data points. This is the foundation of EBM where treatments “just work or don’t work” irrespective of the nuances and differences between human beings, whether patients or prescribers. It’s a system without actors where individual experiences are disregarded as “anecdotes” of “no scientific value”. Students are taught “patients lie all the time, you can only trust data”, and “if a patient tells you they aren’t any better after taking and evidence based treatment they either haven’t taken it or they are lying” and “if a patient says they are better after taking a medicine which is not evidence based they are either lying or deluded”, or their experience is dismissed as “the placebo effect”. (I’ve heard all these exact statements from young doctors in training). I once heard, on BBC Radio 4, a Public Health doctor dismissing the request for continuing treatment at Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, from a patient with psoriasis who said he’d tried everything dermatologists offered but the only treatment which had really helped his psoriasis was homeopathy. The Public Health doctor said that was impossible because he’d read all the clinical trials and homeopathy did not work. Somehow, his literature review was better able to assess the daily experience of this man’s skin, that the man himself.

Health care with no actors, only mechanisms. 

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Love, love, love

February 14, 2026 by bobleckridge

“Love is what and who we dedicate our time to”

Katy Hessel. How to Live an Artful Life

“Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.”

Mary Oliver

Another February, another moment to think about the importance of love. I don’t just mean romantic love, although that’s what we celebrate on the 14th, Valentine’s Day, named after Saint Valentine. I mean love as a way of life. The motherly love, almost all of us experience, which is characterised by unconditional care and attention. The brotherly love, which is the basis of any good society, loving not only your family, but also your neighbours, other people’s neighbours, human beings wherever they live, treating them with respect, care and attention. The love of Life, which underpins our attitude to the world, to all of Nature, ourselves included, to all forms of Life, without which none of this would exist, open to wonder, to the desire to know, to understand, to form strong caring bonds with all that is “not me”. Self love, based on self belief, taking time and making an effort to look after ourselves, to care for this astonishing, complex phenomenon of a body, of an embodied being. 

I can’t define love. I can’t even fully describe it. I can’t lay out its form, its nature or its character. But I know it. And you know it. Because love is an experience. It’s something we do, something we feel, something we live. It’s an attitude towards the world. It’s a way of paying attention. It requires, as Mary Oliver says, openness and empathy. 

We experience love with our hearts. Think of phrases like “heart to heart”, “heart felt”, “heart broken”. I remember Saint Exupery’s “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” and “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”

What we pay attention to grows. What we pay loving attention to grows love. The way we live spreads the way we live. I guess that’s where the idea of karma comes from. Those ripples and waves we cause change the ocean in which we swim. If we live loving, then love spreads. If we live hating, then hatred spreads.

Nobody can make you love. You have to choose to love, pay attention to love, put your energy into love. 

I like this affirmation – “I choose to live a life of love, so that I, so that others, so that Life on this planet, can thrive.”

The old songs remains true, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love”, and “All we need is love” (well, maybe not “all” but it sure helps!) 

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Life after death

February 4, 2026 by bobleckridge

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.” The Secret History. Donna Tartt. 

Throughout my career in Medicine my everyday was spent in one to one consultations with individual patients. My focus was always the person present before me. So you might think I’d be a firm believer in the physical world, and, indeed, I am. 

I found that patients who were suffering were often separated from the here and now, and that, one way to help them find relief was to bring their attention back to the present, teach them to notice and wonder about the everyday. 

I described myself as a wholistic practitioner because I understood each person as a whole being, not divisible into separate realms of mind and body, and certainly not reducible to the body alone. 

But is there more than this? 

When a person dies, is that it? Last chapter written. Book finished. Gone. 

That’s not my experience. Here’s why. 

A human being, a person, is not contained fully within the skin and bones of a body. We exist in relationship. We come to be within relationship. Relationship to others, certainly, but also relationship to the world in which we live. Our senses are activated by the signals they receive from the environment (and, yes, they are also activated by our own minds and bodies). Our world view is created by our experiences and events. We are beings constantly changing, constantly becoming. We are creative beings, always in the process of receiving, giving, expressing, making the everyday unique. 

I read someone recently saying that when they lost their parent, they suffered two losses….the loss of their loved one, and the loss of that part of themselves which only existed in relationship with that loved one. I think that’s an incredibly important insight. 

We are multi-faceted creatures, with a Self which is best understood as a “community of selves”. We experience, and others experience, a different self at work, from at home, a different self with a close friend, with a lover, with a competitor. 

It’s helpful to understand that we are the totality of the multiple relationships in our lives….past, present and future. Yet, where are these selves? Despite advances in neuroscience and imaging techniques we still cannot pinpoint these different aspects of the Self. We know some of the key brain areas involved. But we’ve also discovered that complexes of nerve networks, and chemical messaging pathways in the gut, around the gut, around the heart, and, indeed, throughout our physical body, are also involved. 

Within psychology, neuroscience, and the developing disciplines of psychoneuroimmunology and psychoneuroendocrinology, we have learned that our emotions and our cognition is “embodied”. In other words, they are not confined to our brains. Others have shown that we are good at outsourcing some of our cognition to the extent that we should think of our psyches as not simply “embodied”, but also, “extended”…..extended into the environment and into others. I suppose that’s become all the more obvious with our new technologies. Our phones have taken over vital parts of our memory functions, vital parts of our cognition. We use technology to create what is popularly called a “second brain”. 

But, even though we now understand that no human being lives in complete isolation, even though we now understand that we are not fixed beings captured within physical bodies, isn’t there even more to be understood? 

I think there is. And there’s a clue in that quote from “The Secret History”. We humans have always believed in ghosts, but, nowadays we call them by different names – memory, the unconscious. 

I think we see this best when we consider great artists and musicians. We can recognise a Van Gogh, even if we haven’t seen a particular painting before. We can identify Frank Sinatra even if he’s singing a song we’ve never heard before. We can spot a Mary Oliver poem, a Shakespeare play, a Hemingway novel. Can’t we? Because that’s the thing about the great creators. They were great at expressing their uniqueness. And when that uniqueness resonates with so many people, it can ripple down through not just years, but centuries. 

Even within a single family, there are characters whose uniqueness made such an impact that their “presence” is still felt, and known, generations later. 

There is something about the person which exists and persists outside of, and beyond the body, beyond the mind-body, beyond the brief period of history marked by two dates, a date of birth, and a date of death. 

It’s partly memories, but it’s also partly unconscious patterns of behaviour, patterns of speech or thought, sayings, expressions, the undercurrents of our everyday. It’s the lingering traces of uniqueness. 

You see, we can’t help but change this world, just by being alive. We consume, we metabolise, we send out into the environment molecules, energies, waves, thoughts, ideas and feelings. The world is never the same tomorrow as it is today, and that active, constant process of movement, of adaptation, of growth, of actions and reactions, ripples outwards over much greater distances and timescales than we can be aware of. 

We don’t just stand on the shoulders of giants, we live with them. Don’t you think it might be worthwhile getting to know some of them? We can still reach so many of those unique and amazing people. We can still develop healthy, creative relationships with Bach, with the Beatles, with Van Gogh, Turner, Picasso, with Jane Austen, Keats, T S Eliot, Rodin, Michelangelo and Leonardo, even if they are “long since gone”, because their uniqueness lives on. 

We don’t have to focus solely on the past either, because there is no doubt we are influenced by others every day. We can choose who we want to pay attention to (even if certain massive egos make it hard to ignore them!). We can choose which songs to listen to, which poems to read, which people we want to spend time with. Or we can just be blown along like zombies, driven this way and that, unconsciously, unthinkingly, our days determined by those who seek to influence and control us for their own purposes. 

There are such things as ghosts, and some of them, aren’t even dead yet…..

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Small boats

February 3, 2026 by bobleckridge

The British obsession with “small boats” has always struck me as odd. Not least because the numbers of migrants arriving that way is a tiny fraction of total net immigration. There is no way the people arriving in the UK in these small boats can be responsible for unacceptable NHS waiting lists, inadequate social housing, or poverty and inequality in the country. However, let’s set that aside, because the “Small boats” issue is part of a greater narrative being spread by Right Wing populists in many countries. 

The thing is – we humans migrate. We always have done. We always will. Sometimes it’s just a trickle, other times, it occurs en masse, as it did when early humans moved out of Africa. In fact, we reckon that around 70,000 or 60,000 years ago, modern humans began leaving Africa in large numbers. And they didn’t just stick to the land masses. They set off in small boats. 

A recent article in New Scientist explores the evidence for human migration across seas occuring tens of thousands of years ago. 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2511681-ancient-humans-were-seafaring-far-earlier-than-we-realised/

Indeed, even the ancestors of we homo sapiens headed off to new lands in small boats. “There is probably growing acceptance that early humans, and perhaps hominins like Neanderthals, were making sea crossings to the Greek islands earlier than 200,000 years ago,”

The New Scientist article arrives at some important conclusions. 

“But seafaring also points to something intangible – prehistoric peoples were cooperative. Building boats takes a long time, so “you would have reduced that labour cost by having multiple people”, he adds. Seafaring is also evidence for something even harder to see across deep time: courage….simpler craft don’t feel so secure. “If you start thinking about getting into a hide-skin boat and travelling long distances… there’s absolutely no way that most people would do that.” Yet many prehistoric people, like those who made their way to Malta at least 8500 years ago, must have jumped into boats and taken that chance, voyaging to new lands that they couldn’t be sure were there, because they lay far beyond the horizon. These were incredible, inspiring leaps of faith – and they took our ancestors all around the globe.”

You know what? We’ve inherited all that. We are still a co-operative species, working together to achieve what we couldn’t do separately. And we still have the courage, the “leaps of faith”, to set out, to explore, to discover, to find better lives…..even in small boats. 

Migration can’t be stopped. You can’t stop Nature. What we can do is develop our abilities to work together….to integrate, to cooperate, to build healthy communities, no matter where the inhabitants set off from. 

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And not or

February 2, 2026 by bobleckridge

Some time ago I wrote a book called “And not or” – the idea of “and not or” came to me as a good way to approach life, and it’s since become something of a family feature. One of my grand-daughters, mentioning to a friend who queried it, said “What is “and not or” not a thing in your family?”

Essentially, I believe that “or” is divisive. It’s about “this OR that”. It divides the world into pieces, looking through binary lens. “And” on the other hand, builds bridges, forges connections. It is the link between apparently polar opposites. “And” reminds us that no particular experience or view is complete. We never know all that could be known. “Or” is more judgemental. “And” is more humble, more open to learning more.

Here’s the text of the opening chapter of my book, “And not Or” ………..

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

Is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

Is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

Well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

Own were; any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

The bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

John Donne

Ubuntu – « I am because we are » 

None of us are entirely separate, neither from other people, nor from the rest of the natural world in which we live. On the other hand each of us is unique. It seems as if one of the most fundamental paradoxes in human life is a tension between belonging and uniqueness, between connections and separateness. Do we have to choose between these two options? Or is there some way to reconcile them? Many years ago I was wondering how to share my photos with other people. I looked at one option on the internet – a web service called Flickr, dedicated to storing and sharing photos. I also looked at the fairly new idea, at the time, of personal websites, or “blogs”, where I could post photos and write some descriptions of them. I could combine some creative writing with my photos by sharing some of the thoughts inspired by each image as I reflected on them. It didn’t stop there. There was also Facebook, and Twitter, and a kind of mini-blog site called Tumblr. How could I choose? Each of these options offered some features which the others didn’t, and each service seemed to have its own group of users. I knew that if I shared photos on Flickr, certain people would see them, but if I shared them on a blog, on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, then different people would see them. As I researched the different options and read reviews, I realised I wasn’t the only one finding it difficult to choose. 

Then I came across a phrase taken from the language of logic and computer programming – « and not or » – and a light bulb went on in my head. I could share my photos on more than one of these services. I didn’t have to choose only one. In fact, I discovered that there were many ways to create connections between the different services. I could write a blog post, linking it to a photo hosted on Flickr, whilst automatically sharing it one or more of the other services just by clicking a button named « publish ». 

None of us can be reduced to only one part of our character or nature. We are all multiple within ourselves. Have you ever done the thought experiment where you plan a party for everybody you know, and everybody you’ve ever known? You’d hire a large hall and invite absolutely every relative, friend, colleague, client, well, just anybody who has, or has ever had, a personal connection to you. Pretty quickly as you think about all the people who would be there, you realise that almost the only thing they would all have in common is their connection to you. Chances are you quickly realise this isn’t enough to create a cohesive group. The people you know from different contexts in your life may well not share that much in common with each other. The people you’ve known from different times in your life might not share much in common with each other either. Yes, of course, there will be common threads, common interests, values, shared histories, but their individual and even group differences will amount to more than their similarities. You can imagine that several of your guests won’t really click with each other. It turns out that whilst each of us has many different aspects to our character, which particular aspect comes to the fore is highly context sensitive. I could slip easily between my roles of husband, father, son, doctor, colleague, teacher or friend, just to name a few of the more prominent ones. I am not stuck in any single role. I should be able to behave appropriately according to the social context. 

And not or. 

This is how we live. We constantly change. We flow back and forwards between different aspects of our selves. We don’t choose one role and then attempt to live a whole life within it. 

But wait, I hear you say, we have to make choices all the time, don’t we? There are many circumstances where have to make a decision, to commit to one direction rather than another. We can’t have our cake and eat it. 

You are right. We often have to choose. In fact, we have created an entire economic system on having to choose. We have even turned choosing into one of our highest virtues. Freedom equals the freedom to choose. Choosing is based on the word « or ». You can choose this political party in the election, or that one. You can apply for this job, or different one. You can spend your money on this, or that. It is the basis of competition and a free market economy. Competition is the basis of both capitalism and our modern interpretation of Darwin’s principle of selection. Different options are set against each other. One wins, the other loses. This is just how things are. 

When I say « and not or », I’m not advocating the famous « have your cake and eat it ». Nor am I advocating indecision or indifference. The way of « or » is inextricably bound to the way of « and », just as our need to be unique and separate is bound to our need to belong and to connect. Choosing « and » neither restricts us, nor does it stop us from making decisions.

I’ve come to believe that « or » has become too dominant in our culture and in our everyday lives. I’m anxious that it is separating us from each other, setting us in opposition to each other. We seem to be living through a time when polarities and mutually exclusive identities are proliferating, and on the back of that we are witnessing more strife, more anger, and more division. We hear the rhetoric of « us not them », which stokes prejudice, hatred and suspicion. We have created a civilisation of oppositional camps, each creating their own little worlds, each speaking only to like-minded others in shared echo chambers. We talk of « winners and losers » where the winners take all and the losers are advised to « suck it up » and « move on ». There are more walls going up, more doors being closed, less bridges being built, and less agreements made. Competition and winning are seen as strong and desirable, whilst co-operation and consensus are portrayed as weak. 

I want to contribute towards a redressing of the balance. I know we have to make decisions. I know we often have to choose. But when we invest too much in « or » then things start to fall apart. « Or » divides, separates, alienates and creates dis-ease. 

It’s my contention that we need more « and » because «and» connects, creates healthy bonds, encourages sharing, and a sense of belonging. We need «and» in order to heal. 

« Or » stops thought. We choose, we separate, we finish. Why would I be interested in anything else when I’ve already made my choice? 

« And », on the other hand, pushes us towards novelty and connections. It stokes our curiosity, demands our humility, sustains our open-ness to others and to change. It can teach us how to handle uncertainty and unpredictability. It can develop our capacities for awareness, reflection, flexibility and adaptation. 

Every living organism survives and grows by making connections, by being open the flows of materials, energies and information in which we all exist. Every living organism survives and grows by responding to, and adapting to, the ever changing environments and contexts in which we all exist. 

Maybe the best way for me to explore and share this idea is to tell something of the story of my life. Maybe the best thing I can do is to share some of my experiences and to reflect on how those experiences shaped me, and shaped my life. 

This is my story. These are some of my stories. I’m writing this to help me make sense of my life. Maybe reading my story will help you make more sense of yours, too, and I’d be delighted if that were the case, but, ultimately, you will have your own stories to tell. We all do. 

You can find a Kindle version of the book here – https://amzn.eu/d/akoOnrz (or search Amazon in your own country)

A paperback version, with colour photos, is available on Blurb – https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/10155078

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Two stories of immigration

February 1, 2026 by bobleckridge

Two stories about immigration caught my eye this week. 

Firstly, here in France, applications for full citizenship are down in 2025 following a tightening of the guidelines issued to the Prefectures. Not only have they increased the required level of French language skill from B1 to B2, but the evidence required to demonstrate “integration” has been increased from verbal claims to written attestations about volunteering, membership of associations and attendance at memorial events. Perhaps, most significantly, for retirees, there is now a requirement that the majority of a person’s income must be sourced in France, so if you are retiring from another country with a pension, that no longer counts as “economic integration”. Well, that’s the end of the road for me! In addition, Justice Minister, Gerard Darmanin. has proposed a two or three year “pause” on ALL legal migration. The overall message here is that the current French authorities see immigration as a bad thing, and despite the fact that almost 10% of the population is of foreign origin, they have no plans to facilitate integration of those 6 million people into society. 

The second article which caught my attention is really the polar opposite of the first. Spain has proposed that the 500,000 “undocumented” people living in Spain can apply for a one year residency permit which is extendable, legalising the position of half a million foreigners, as part of an over all strategy of integration based on human rights and fairness, which, they believe, will improve both Spanish society and the economy. The Far Right don’t like this, of course, arguing amongst other things, that this will make Spain more attractive to immigrants, and that as their numbers increase, then the pay and conditions of Spanish workers will be put at risk. 

I was never a fan of Theresa May’s ‘Hostile Environment” policy. It strikes me as bizarre to think the best way to stop people wanting to come and live in your country is to make living in your country more miserable for them. If the aim of a government is to make their country safer and better for the whole population, it’s counterintuitive to try and make life more precarious and worse for SOME of them. 

The economic argument is not as simple as the Right Wing populists argue either. The Spanish government argues that active integration of immigrants into the agriculture and care sectors, amongst others, for example, will plug the existing employment gaps in those areas. But, in addition to that, what about the immigrants who set up businesses and employ those currently unemployed? And what about those with skills who can then teach and train others, enabling many more people in Spain to get better jobs with better skills?

Perhaps the worst stories about immigration currently are those flowing from the USA which seems to have determined that getting rid of as many black or brown immigrants as possible will be an over all benefit. Deploying masked, armed men to workplaces, schools, courts and homes, snatching people without recourse to lawyers or courts and putting them in detention centres then sending them abroad, is surely one of the harshest regimes of treatment of immigrants in the world. 

Meanwhile Right Wing populist parties across the planet spread an increasingly nasty, prejudiced narrative about immigration, as if it is the greatest, even only, cause of hardship in any country. These narratives are sheer xenophobia, labelling foreigners as criminals or scroungers.

I say, good on the Spanish! Let’s hope their strategy pays off and that other countries begin to follow. Human beings migrate. Always have done, always will. All human beings should have equal rights. They are all of equal value. 

Diversity is Nature’s super-power. 

I believe everyone who lives in the same country should have the same rights, and, be valued the same. I totally oppose discriminatory treatment based on the country of origin of a person, or their family. 

We need to work harder at integration – not just of immigrants into countries, but of whole populations. Inequality has reached record levels, resulting in many more people living lives of exclusion and hardship. Let’s tackle that. Let’s make our countries more equal, more just, and more fair. Not less so. 

“Integration for everyone!” 

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