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Archive for the ‘from the consulting room’ Category

Well, well

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on March 19, 2021| Leave a Comment »

There’s an old stone well in the garden where I live. It’s got a rusty metal cover which is fastened with a padlock but we opened it to look down inside when we arrived here. Using a roll of string and an old key we measured about twenty metres down to the surface of the water. How deep the water is, I’ve no idea. Above the well is an iron bowl hung from an arch by a short chain. Obviously you can’t lower the bowl into the well to get water, but, somehow it seems totally appropriate.

The Redstart, and some of the other small birds, like to sit at the top of the arch, and I like to photograph the well in different lights and against different skies. There’s something deep, something rooted, something which connects me to this place, this time, and times gone past, when I look at this well.

This particular photo was taken, as you can see, during a spectacular sunset. One of those sunsets which sets the entire sky ablaze. We get a lot of sunsets like that over the summer months especially. When I look at this image I think of the four basic elements – the Sun’s fire, the winds in the Air which stretch the clouds over the sky, the Water deep in the well, and the solid Earth and rock from which the well is made, and into which it has been dug.

I think, too, of the hands of humans, because it took human imagination and craft to dream up this particular well with its iron bowl, and it took the skill of humans to sink the well, surround the top with stone, and fashion the iron bowl and its fixings.

I wonder about the beginnings of this well, and don’t doubt it was sunk to find water. There’s a very high calcium content in the incredibly stony ground in this part of the world, a region which is called the “Grande Champagne” because of the high quality of Cognac produced from the vines which thrive in this most unlikely looking soil. It’s a soil which doesn’t hold onto the water. So, I think of the vineyards and the men and women who plant the vines, prune them, nurture them, and harvest their grapes. I think of the distillers with their giant copper stills. And I think of the astoundingly varied flavours of the local cognacs which they make.

I haven’t used the well to draw water, and I don’t think anyone else has done that for many, many years. Whoever added the iron bowl and its fixings was doing something else – creating a work of beauty – something delightful to look at. And, probably without predicting it, creating a favourite perch for the local, smaller birds. Did they realise the well would look this beautiful against such gorgeous sunsets? Maybe they did.

Do you see what’s happening here?

This “object” – this “thing” we call a “well” – I find that I develop a relationship with it. I notice it. It catches my attention. I contemplate it on different days, in different weathers, and against very different skies. It delights me. It stirs my curiosity. And it sets off trains of thought which travel along a multiplicity of connections. It changes my experience of the everyday.

That’s how the human mind works. When we are well, when we are growing and thriving, we are driven by our deepest feelings – the affects – which make us the seeking, connecting, joyful creatures we were born to be. Conversely, when we sick, when we blocked or stuck, we disconnect, withdraw, and seek protection. It’s not that the former group are good, and the latter bad. We need all of our affective strategies to survive and thrive. But I’m convinced that the more we nurture joy and curiosity, the more we pursue beauty and harmony, the more we build mutually beneficial relationships in our extended webs of connections, the healthier we will be.

That’s how we thrive. That’s how we grow. That’s how we flourish.

I wish you well.

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Strange, rare and peculiar

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, science on March 18, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I’ve seen this only once.

One day, three years ago, I looked up and saw this sort of rainbow. I say “sort of rainbow” because it isn’t actually an arch. From time to time, in different places, I have noticed various rainbow-type phenomena. I’ve seen them in the spray of water in a fountain, in short almost square patches in the sky, and even in long thin strips once. But this particular one looks different from all the other ones I’ve seen elsewhere.

I don’t expect I’ll see another one the same.

What caught my attention? Was it the sudden appearance of colours in the sky? Perhaps. But I don’t think it was all down to the colours. The shape, the size and the location were equally important. What really caught my attention was its uniqueness. It appeared strange, rare and peculiar.

Some of you may recognise that triad of terms – strange, rare and peculiar. It’s one which was at the heart of my medical practice for several decades. I found that every single patient who came to see me was unique. I was never able to, nor ever wished to, reduce them to a diagnostic category. Naming their disease was one small step towards understanding them. Listening non-judgementally, with genuine curiosity and interest allowed them to unfurl their stories. Every story was strange, rare and peculiar. In every story I would be struck by something. Something would provoke a question, stir a sense of awe or amazement, in me, move me, suggest to me that here was a story of a unique life, a life where particular (peculiar) events occurred, and which had unusual (rare) effects. Every story would strike me as having something distinct, something “not normal” (strange) about it. Because that’s how life is.

Every single one of us is “strange, rare and peculiar”. We cannot be understood as “data sets”, spreadsheets full of “variables”, “averages”, “norms” or “typical features”.

And so, I learned, this is true, not only of patients in a consulting room. It is true of life.

Iain McGilchrist’s “The Master and His Emissary” remains one of the key texts of my life. His description and exploration of the asymmetry of the two halves of our brain (our two cerebral hemispheres) has helped me make sense of things in so many circumstances. Our left hemisphere is great for picking bits out of what we perceive, matching them up against our memory banks of what we know already, ascribing labels to them, and filing them away as further examples of familiar categories. Our right hemisphere, however, is continually on the lookout for what’s new, what’s different. It engages with the world as a whole, not as a collection of bits. It sees whatever we are looking at in its contexts, understands it in its vast web of connections and relationships with everything else.

In short, I think, our right hemisphere is terrific for finding the “strange, rare and peculiar”.

So what? you might ask. Well, look again at this photo. I find that the colours and shapes together are beautiful. I love the way light has been prised apart into these bands of colour, in two clouds, one above the other. I love how this phenomenon hangs on a setting sun orange sky, how the silhouettes of the trees form the lower border of the image, and how flocks of birds scatter across the entire sky.

It’s all very beautiful. Enchanting. Entrancing, even. It amazes and delights. It makes me feel good to be alive, and humbles me with the awareness that I will never know all that can be know. I will never cease to encounter what I’ve never encountered before. And neither will “we”, we humans together. I love the feeling of wonder and curiosity that these events create. I love the sense of mystery.

Opening ourselves up to what’s strange, rare and peculiar, turns out to be a great way to live.

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One year….

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on March 17, 2021| 2 Comments »

17th March 2020, I sat down and wrote my first post of the pandemic. We went into a national “confinement” that day here in France. None of us knew or even guessed exactly how the next 365 days would unravel. I certainly didn’t think I’d write a post every single day for an entire year. But here I am, still writing. What I committed to on this day one year ago was to share a beautiful photo I’d taken, describe some of the “émerveillement” (wonders and delights) of my every day experience, and share my caring heart.

I still think those are some of the best things I can do – share my joy, my delight, my awe, my wondering, my perspectives, thoughts and understanding – share them all through the lens of a loving, caring heart.

I still think that whatever we think, imagine or do, influences our daily experience of life, changes the lives of others, and co-creates the reality of life on this one, small, blue planet. So we should try to live not on autopilot, but with awareness, with consciousness and with agency. “Heroes not zombies” folks!

As I look at this photo this morning I remember the day I sat on a plane and saw the Sun come up between the clouds. Yep, that’s what that image is – the Sun emerging with clouds above and below (as above, so below) – and I immediately hear Leonard Cohen in my ear. I suppose his line has become one of the most famous lines in song history, but it’s still a brilliant line.

There is a crack, a crack, in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

By the way, if you want to read about the origins of that phrase, check out this excellent article. It reveals some of the roots and influences which led to this particular form of words.

Back to my photo – it looks to me that I’m staring right at that crack which is letting the light in. But, hey, hasn’t this pandemic been just such a crack?

Hasn’t it shone a bright, clear light on the fact that we are one human race, embedded in one living planet, sharing the same air, the same water, the same earth?

Hasn’t it shown us the power of co-operation and collaboration?

Hasn’t it highlighted the vulnerabilities we are subject to from our current model of civilisation? Highlighted poverty, precarious employment, poor nutrition, inequality and injustice, climate change, loss of biodiversity, how we treat animals, and just how broken our economic and political models are?

We are a long, long way from dealing with any of these problems and our current silver bullet of vaccination will not be enough to create a stronger, more resilient, healthier community of humans on this planet. I still have hope. I still hope that as the pain of the wounded crack, and the illuminating brightness of the light which gets in, we will be motivated to enhance the incredible inventive genius and co-operative, social power of human beings to create a better world.

But, hey, right here, right now, I will continue with my commitment and share with you a beautiful image, a positive thought or idea, and my passion for love and kindness. I hope these touch you, and you transform them with your own unique experience and imagination, and pass them on to others.

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Cycles of life

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, science on March 15, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I got down on my tummy and took this photo. What captured my attention was the delicate but vibrant life of this new leaf on its bright green stalk. I’ve come back to this image again and again to contemplate the incredible phenomenon of birth and growth……how a seed can germinate, push out stalks and leaves and begin a long journey upwards towards the Sun…..growing and maturing until it realises its full potential as a flower, a bush or a tree.

Ever since I studied embryology at university I’ve been in awe of how a single fertilised cell can differentiate into so many other types of cells, and how each cells develops in exactly the right place! I mean just think of it in terms of a human being…..how does that single fertilised cell which first divides itself into two cells, then four cells, then eight, and so on, grow a head where a head should be, a heart where a heart should be, and so on to create a beautiful fully formed baby? It still astonishes me.

But the other reason I return to this image is because I look at where the young plant is growing and I can see it is emerging from a forest floor covered in dead leaves. Right in that observation we see the basic principles of life and death….of how there are cycles to life, cycles of birth, growth, development, maturity, ageing and death. That story isn’t a straight line. It’s a circle. Many people have pointed out how, unlike human beings, there is no waste in Nature. Everything transforms into something else. We humans haven’t quite learned that trick and throw away, discard, dump what we don’t want. Where do we think it goes? What happens to all the waste we produce? What effects does it have on the complex, interconnected cycles of Nature on this little shared planet?

I’m already hearing economists and politicians say how they are looking forward to the world economy “re-starting” and saying “we need to get people consuming again”. Already they are talking about how to stimulate “growth” with little thought given to growth of what, and how that increased consumption is both sustainable in a finite planet, and how it fits with the cycles of the natural world.

My hope for after this pandemic is that we undergo what I recently heard an economist call a “metamorphosis”. He said “A butterfly is not an upgraded caterpillar”. What a great phrase! The current system is broken. It’s not meeting the needs of either the human race or the rest of life on this planet. It’s increasing inequality, it’s making us all more vulnerable and it’s teetering on the brink of total collapse.

We need a metamorphosis – we need to emerge from this crisis with new ways of living, new ways of meeting the needs of Life on Earth.

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Special

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, from the reading room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology on March 14, 2021| Leave a Comment »

“Special” – there’s a difficult word – when someone claims they are special they might be claiming that they are the exception which should be respected – that they don’t need to follow the same rules as the rest of the community. This “exceptionalism” is the root of a lot of trouble in the world. The danger with “special” is that others are seen as “not special”.

But I am a great fan of this word, and I think we fail to grasp it enough. This Robin is special to me. He lives in “my garden”. I see him almost every day. We know that Robins are territorial birds and I don’t ever, ever see a flock of Robins in my garden. I can’t be sure that the Robin I see today is the exact same Robin that I saw yesterday, but I assume he is. There are other birds like this near me. There’s a “Little Owl” who lives under the roof of my neighbour’s barn. He often sits on the roof at dusk and watches me as I close the wooden shutters over the windows of the house. He doesn’t fly away when he sees me. I’ve become familiar to him. You could say that we have become special to each other. There’s also a Redstart which returns to this garden every Spring and flies away for the Winter. We have had several back and forth whistling conversations together, the Redstart and I, and when I hear his call again in the Spring I know that Winter is over. When my grand-daughter hears him she says “There’s your friend, grandpa”.

In “The Little Prince”, the boy claims that his rose is “special”, that she is different from all the other roses. He cares for her more than he does for all the other roses. And there’s the key – what makes that one rose special is the attention and time he has invested in her, watering her, protecting her from the grazing sheep, and so on. It’s the time, attention, and emotional investment which makes this rose genuinely “special” for him.

I think everyone is “special”, and contrary to what I wrote above about exceptionalism, in my experience, in the consulting room, one to one, with patient after patient, I found that it was way, way too common for people to fail to realise just how special they are. In fact, they might have been bombarded with messages which have said the exact opposite for years – “you are nothing”, “you are worthless”, “you don’t matter”.

Those messages are cruel and they are wrong.

Every single human being is special, in the sense that they are unique. There are no two of us with identical bodies and minds, no two of us born in identical places, at identical times, to identical families. There are no two of us with identical life stories. In all my four decades of work as a doctor I never heard the same life story twice.

“Special” works when we embrace the paradox of “special” with humility. But there’s something else, and it comes back to what makes us unique – what makes us unique is our connections. Not our differences. I am not special because I am different from everyone else. I am special because of the particular, vast, complex web of connections and relationships that I have, that I’ve had, and that I will have.

One more thing to add here – love.

It’s not just our relationships which make both you and I special. It’s the relationships which we invest with love and care which make both you and I special.

Have you ever noticed that? Just like The Little Prince, the more we care, the more we love, the more compassion we have, the more special others become.

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The heart is the key

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on March 13, 2021| Leave a Comment »

Do you know what I like most about this photo?

The heart shape is carved into the keystone.

Without the keystone, the entire structure will collapse. The bridge can’t exist without the keystone. What are our keystones? We, human beings? What are the keystones without which we cannot exist?

Well, actually, I’m simplifying things already, aren’t I? Because you can’t reduce the entire existence of a single human being, let alone the entire human species, to a single structure. In reality there are many essential “keystones” in a life.

But I still like this concept of the keystone. It’s kind of a declaration of a priority. It highlights something so important that life would be utterly different without it.

And this keystone has a symbol of a heart carved into it. So, here’s something to consider today –

What if we recognise that our heart, our way of “seeing with the heart”, our “heart felt emotions”, our “heart felt values”, should be the keystone in our life?

Without going into all the science of affective neurology, of neural networks within the human body, of the intricate and elaborate connections between the heart, the brain and the rest of the body, I just want to focus today on how we support, nurture and develop the heart……the heart-centred way of living.

Well, we know the heart is healthy (and I don’t just mean working well as a pump) when it is in harmony, when the “heart rate variability” hits a certain sweet spot. And we know that this sweet spot is associated with certain emotions and certain experiences. Specifically, joy, awe, wonder, and love. Whether you look at the work of someone like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who describes flow states from a psychological perspective, someone like Dan Siegel, who teaches about achieving a state of integration, or The Heartmath Institute, which focuses on heart rate variability, you will discover what experiences and behaviours are associated with a healthy heart.

If we put the following to the fore –

  • love
  • joy
  • kindness
  • compassion
  • gratitude
  • wonder
  • awe

then we are creating the opportunities to build healthier and better lives, for ourselves, for loved ones, for others, and for the entire planet.

It’s not everything, there’s a lot more we can do, but if we create the intentions every day to exhibit, to practice and to experience love, joy, kindness, compassion, gratitude, wonder and awe, then we will build a really powerful, strong keystone – a heart-centred keystone.

You might say, but, hey, I can’t experience all of those every day, and you’ll be right, but I’d be surprised if you can’t choose to express, and/or discover at least one of these, every single day. I mean, why not give it a go? Why not take it as one of those “30 day challenge” exercises? How about making a chart and recording each day which of the ones you have expressed or experienced?

Maybe something like this ……….

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Kindness

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, neuroscience, perception, personal growth, philosophy, photography, psychology, science on March 12, 2021| 2 Comments »

Ever since I saw this door with its heart shaped hole (presumably a “peep hole” to see who is knocking at the door?) I’ve really liked it. It got me thinking how this shape, this powerful symbol, right there on the front door, might influence the lives of those who come across it every single day. It also made me wonder about whether or not it led the residents of this house to see the world through the lens of the heart – and as Saint-Éxupery wrote in “The Little Prince”, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”.

Of course there is a lot in that simple little phrase, but the meaning I’m reflecting on today is the power of the heart to shape our best thoughts, our best ideas, our best behaviours. The heart, it transpires, is not a simple mechanical pump pushing blood around the circulatory system. Around the heart is a network of specialised nerve cells – neurones – the kind you find in the brain. It seems that this “neural network” around the heart acts more to send information to the brain, than it does to respond to information from the brain. Just stop and think about that for a moment. We tend to have the idea that we do our thinking, our imagining and our feeling in our brains. But it’s not that simple. We also do a good deal of our mental work with the heart. Actually, there are other neural networks in the body too, and the reality is that the “mind” is an “embodied” phenomenon. The division of a person into “body” and “mind” is a tad artificial!

It seems the heart is especially involved in creating some of our emotions and in harmonising the diverse elements of our being. By that last phrase I mean, one of the things the heart is good at doing is producing “integration” of our entire complex being…..of producing “resonance” within ourselves, and between ourselves and others – yes, it actually sends out detectable energy waves beyond the body…..in rhythms which can influence the rhythms of those around us.

It turns out that the “symbolism” of the loving heart is rooted in biological, physical reality.

The truth is acting with love, wonder, generosity, gratitude and kindness is something that is really good for our health. When we approach others and the world from the heart-felt position of care and compassion then we increase the healthy resonances within ourselves and between ourselves and others.

So, that’s partly why I return again and again to the role of kindness. Can’t we use that more as a tool for living? Can’t we use it more to improve our own lives and those of others? How about we use that as the main touchstone? How about we ask ourselves, of our own actions and words, as well asking of others and even of governments and organisations, “how much kindness does this spread?”

Because I reckon whatever we do, think or believe that diminishes kindness harms us, and harms every other living being. In fact, I believe it harms “Gaia” – the living Earth. Conversely, when we come across the stories of cruelty, injustice, neglect, or violence in the world and we wonder “what can I do to make things better?”, then, one thing (obviously not the ONLY thing) we can do, is try to act, to speak and even to think with more kindness…..to live in better harmony with our hearts.

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Twists and turns of an evolving world

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, narrative, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology, science on March 7, 2021| Leave a Comment »

We change all the time. The world changes all the time. Nothing is fixed or, so called, “permanent”. I thought about that when I received my residency card here in France recently. I’ve been given what is called a “Carte de Sejour Permanente” – a permanent residency card. That’s me sorted, you might think. Then I notice that it expires in ten years time. Do they know something I don’t? Well, no, thank goodness, it’s just that permanent seems to last ten years in this instance.

That did get me thinking about the whole concept of permanent. Which isn’t something I’ve explored all that much. I have wondered for a long time about the concept of “now” – which is a period of time when we instantly recognise but is devilishly difficult to pin down or define. I mean the moment you think “this is now”, that moment has slipped away into the past and been replaced by an entirely new “now”! But back to “permanent” – I guess we just use this wonder to mean a fairly longish piece of time – in relation to geology we might be talking thousands of years, and in relation to the universe perhaps billions, but, in every single case, we discover that nothing is fixed, nothing really does retain the same, exact features and characteristics (cripes, even the same molecules!) for ever. It’s just the speed of change which alters.

Yet, in our own lives, things happen, and after they’ve happened nothing ever seems the same again. Like you can see in this image of a tree that I’ve shared above. This tree has the most dramatic change of direction which has completely changed its shape forever….ok, for the rest of its life then. And when I see a “lesion” like this I immediately wonder “What happened?” I used to have the same approach with patients in the consulting room. They might come with a problem which had gone on for decades and I always asked them to think back to the time when they felt completely well, then to tell me about the appearance of the first symptoms. That naturally led on to a discussion about what was happening in their life around the time of the big change. I don’t think there’s any way to prove cause and effect in such a scenario but I found it helpful to take the position of “Let’s imagine that what was happening then was significant in bringing about what happened next” That seemed to open the way to a new understanding of illness, it’s significance and possible meaning, which gave a patient the opportunity to change their way of dealing with it to something more helpful, something which might even open the doors to growth and development.

In that sense I think that the events of our lives change us. The most significant events change us dramatically and for the rest of our lives. Death of a loved one, giving birth, serious trauma……you know the kind of thing. All of that, for the individual concerned leaves a permanent change – it can’t be erased. But the way forward with that is learning to create different responses from the ones which have trapped us in suffering. In other words, we can’t change the past, but we can change the way the past impacts on us by choosing to respond differently.

This pandemic is going to change us all……has already changed us all. There won’t be any “return to normal” even if many people desire that…..and nor should there be. Because this event is an opportunity for us, individually and collectively, to reflect, ask ourselves what we were doing that might have contributed to the particular experiences of the pandemic and what we might do differently now to not end up in the same place again.

We have a chance now to reassess our values, our beliefs and our behaviours. To change our priorities, to demand change in our economic, political and social systems. I hope we do that. We’ll all remember 2020. I hope we remember it as the year which led the world to take a different direction.

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Facing the world

Posted in art, creativity, from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, perception, personal growth, photography, psychology on March 6, 2021| Leave a Comment »

At Otagi Nenbutsu-ji outside of Kyoto, there is an extraordinary display of sculptures – read more about them here. They are all small figures, but the emphasis is on the faces. Each one was created by a different person, so each one is completely unique. You can see several of them if you click on the link in the first sentence of this post.

This particular one has a gorgeous expression. What does this convey to you? To me, it conveys delight, happiness, contentment, and a certain open hearted, loving sense of wonder. I know, I know, what we experience is an interplay that emerges from the connection between ourselves and whatever we have engaged with, so a lot of what this conveys to me comes from personal disposition and preferences. But that’s just how life is. You can’t take your subjective reality out of your daily experience!

What effect does this expression have one you? Because it does have an effect. It calms me. It soothes me. It stirs feelings of love and kindness in my heart. And as those emotions start to flow, they will change the complex balance of chemicals in my body, boosting my immune system and calming down my inflammatory system. Isn’t that amazing? I can change the chemical status of my “inner environment” and so my state of health by what I choose to engage with.

We do this all the time. Subconsciously for the most part, but we do it all the same. Our inner state, and our wellbeing, change constantly in response to the signals and triggers we encounter every day, and according to our own reaction and response patterns and habits. We can become more aware of them, and when we do, we can move more of our lives from react-mode to response-mode which frees us up from living in auto-pilot, or what I call “zombie living”. That lets us become more autonomous, more able to develop new patterns of response, and, yes, even reaction. More able to develop new behaviours, new habits, and new patterns of thought.

That’s the first thing I wanted to share with you when I looked at this image again today, but there’s something else too.

As we walk around our every day world there is one face we don’t see – our own. OK, we can see the mirror image of our face (which isn’t what other people see) and we can see photos of ourselves (look how many selfies people take nowadays!) so we do have opportunities to be able to see our faces. But we have to stop what we are doing and change our expressions to do both of those things. We can’t see the “live view” which other people have…..the expressions on our faces when we meet them, when we converse with them, when we engage with them.

Yet, look again at this image – it’s clear, isn’t it, that the facial expression has an effect on you? Well, that’s true of you as well. Your facial expression is having an effect on everyone who sees it. So, I wonder, what kind of effect do you want to have on other people? What kinds of responses and changes within them do you think might occur when they see the expression on your face?

I’ve said before that we can’t not influence the world we live in. We change it moment by moment by our breath, by our movement, by our actions and behaviours, whether we choose them consciously or not. But here’s another way we influence the world we live in – through our facial expressions.

Of course we can’t go about our lives consciously fashioning particular facial expressions all the time, but when we spend part of each day generating feelings of love, kindness, gratitude and wonder, then that will all play out in our faces, and we will literally radiate those vibes.

In contrast, when we spend a lot of our day in fear and anger then……guess what? That reminds me of the old story about the hungry wolves inside us.

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Seasonal eating

Posted in from the consulting room, from the dark room, from the living room, health, life, personal growth, photography, science on March 4, 2021| 2 Comments »

The first white asparagus of the season are arriving. The main lunchtime news had an item about the white asparagus from the “Landes” region yesterday, showing the first harvest. This is one of the most impressive differences for me about coming to live in South West France and it’s about food. Firstly, before I came here I don’t remember the annual seasonal arrival of any foodstuffs feeling like an “event”. I’m not even sure I could tell you what were the main seasons for anything in Scotland. But there are a number of distinct foods which appear seasonly here in France. Secondly, I don’t remember the seasonal arrival of any foodstuff being covered by the national news. Both of these phenomena are just normal here.

So, here we are in March and suddenly it’s the beginning of the asparagus season. First of all, the white asparagus. This season will only last until June so you’ve just over three months to enjoy it. In other words, it’s not just about the seasonal arrival of a particular fruit or vegetable, it’s that the season is exactly what you’d expect – about a quarter of a year – then you need to wait till this time next year until the local, fresh, harvest appears again.

I took this photo a few years ago at one of the markets in Aix en Provence. I’d never seen that much asparagus before! Well, I’ve seen displays like this quite often in different parts of France since then (always, of course, at this time of year). In fact, in the weekly market in Rochefort, which isn’t too far from where I live, I heard a vendor behind a display like this shouting “Aspergez-vous!” – which would translate as “Asparagus yourself!” – nope, I don’t think you’d find that verb in a French dictionary. It was just his personal creativity and enthusiasm on display.

I don’t think I’d ever tasted asparagus before I came to live in France, and I certainly didn’t know there was both white asparagus and green asparagus. But I love it now – both kinds! I love it simply boiled with lemon juice drizzled onto it on the plate, and I love the white especially in a risotto. What a treat!

So here’s what I’ve learned from this experience – that when you eat food in its season, food which hasn’t travelled too many kilometres, food which hasn’t been processed, it tastes superb. Not only that, eating that food becomes something of an event. To eat it when it arrives in the market in season you experience a kind of excitement, a sort of thrill, which is added to the actual taste of that food. Applying this principle enhances my enjoyment of the food I eat, and when it comes to diets and “healthy eating”, enjoyment is not a supplementary option. It should be at the heart of the decision making. (This is a reverse to that old adage about the best diet being the one where “if it tastes good, spit it out!”)

I’m now more aware of variety in my diet. I’m more aware of how far the food has travelled. I’m more aware of wanting to choose what’s been produced locally where I can – and I’m happy to expand that concept of “local” depending on what the food is! (Corsican clementines are another of my all time favourite seasonal foods for example).

OK, so let me be clear. I don’t eat ONLY what is seasonal and local. But I have an awareness of those factors and I’ll deliberately choose them when I can. And yes, I know, not everyone has the same culture as the one I’m experiencing here. France has markets with local and seasonal produce really in every town….even quite small towns. That isn’t the case back in Scotland, and it might not be the case where you live. However, the culture of local small producer markets was always one of my favourite things about France when I used to come on holiday here and knowing that certainly influenced my decision to emigrate and to come and live here. (I emigrated to live in a different culture, a different language and a different climate)

How is it where you live? Are you able to access seasonal foods? If you are, I really recommend it. And, oh, yes, I’m pretty sure that a diet with plenty of seasonal and local plant based foods in it is a healthy diet. But I don’t think there is any one good diet which is best for everyone. I think it’s great we are different and we can make different choices.

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