Last night I went to the wrong film. A lapse of concentration at the ticket office meant that I saw a film call Won’t You Be My Neighbour instead of Three Identical Strangers. Kind of linked in broad idea, I guess, (if I am being kind to myself). Both documentaries, so at least the same genre. It's not as if I set of to see PS I love you and ended up in Mad Max Fury Road. I realised the mistake about ten minutes in. I felt disappointment and a [...]
A few years ago my sister gave me Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. I started reading it, thought it was pretty interesting, and got about half way through. About a week ago, his name having come up again in a number of important conversations, I picked it up again. This time I couldn’t put the book down. If I were to go against the rule I set myself in the last post, I’d make some trite comment that sometimes things arrive at a time when you can’t really process them, [...]
Since I lost all my previous blog posts, I’ve been having difficulty building the stock up. I’m stuck. They call this writers’ block, that’s the generic name anyway. The specific problem goes something like this: I have a small idea, something that’s occurred to me during the day. I start to write about it and then I get to the part where I have to bring it all together and wrap it up with some kind of pithy observation. Then I dry up, banality getting the better of me. I [...]
I am proud of my excellent memory. I know exactly what people said, what they wore, how the behaved, years back. No one queries it, which is how I know I’m right. I am currently visiting the apartment in Aix en Provence that I first visited as a fifteen year old. It’s not unusual to visit places you came to as a child, often you visit periodically over your life. I guess it’s slightly less usual to have had a forty year gap. Several things have struck me. First, I’d [...]
I lost my website a fortnight ago. It was my fault. I ignored an email that looked quite boring. It was from the hosting company, referring to something I didn’t recognise and asking me to update my card details, in itself a tedious task. I hadn’t kept a copy of the website (though I managed to retrieve bits of pieces of it). I especially hadn’t kept copies of the blog posts. I drafted them straight onto the site. There are so many morals from this sorry story that I hardly [...]
Mediators make much of the value of apology in dispute resolution, but what does sorry mean and what should a mediator do with it? Often, it is part of the training - a whole session on apology and how important it is to acknowledge it and make sure the other party has heard it. Indeed, it’s not usual for one or both parties to enter a mediation insisting on an apology, so when the inexperienced mediator hears that, they think – bingo – my job’s done! I’ve always been [...]
First published November 2012 The row between the parents of the boy who missed the birthday party remains at the top of the news agenda despite the obvious fact that it’s a) trivial beyond speaking, b) embarrassing all round, c) awful for the kids and d) absolutely pathetic. Why are we still talking about it? Because we love a bit of argy bargy; each of us is, despite ourselves, taking a view on who’s right, who’s wrong; some of us are marshalling our opinions on what we think of birthday parties on dry ski [...]
First, let me say some mediations do fail. These are mediations were never going to result in agreement, resolution, or even a better understanding by the parties of their dispute. This might be for several reasons, but the commonest are that the mediator wasn't skilled and didn't do the job properly, and that the parties just weren't playing. But there's another outcome that is referred to as "failed" that is no such thing. This is the mediation (and I'm talking specifically civil and commercial here) that is set down for a [...]
