Hiccupps

It's 14 years since I first posted on Hiccupps and one since I wrote about about  using trees for my mental health . Both practices are ongoing. Trees first: every Saturday I find a space with trees and spend a few minutes of silence with them. I breathe slowly and deeply and I look up through the branches to the sky, visualising a tangled journey into the blue, imagining it is my path to a better place.  The picture at the top is from the park around Schloss Lübbenau because last weekend I was in Germany but it can be any tree, anywhere. I have done it with a single tree on a quiet street corner. Blogging next: I am often asked why I blog. Sadly, I don't have a straightforward answer. On one level I just like to write. Before I wrote this blog I wrote a music fanzine for ten years. I genuinely can't remember when I didn't write something . It feels intrinsic, part of me.  My anniversary posts  talk about different extrinsic motivations at different times: I had exp...

Jerome Groopman, in How Doctors Think , reviews ways in which doctors can make poor choices, identifies potential causes, and suggests some practices, for both doctor and patient, that can help to prevent them. I find this interesting for a couple of reasons: first, I work in the health space, although not in a therapeutic area and, second, I like to reflect on my own thought processes. I'll take three broad themes from Groopman's analysis: the business of healthcare and how that impacts a physician's ability to practice; the doctor-patient relationship and how that impacts the experience of both sides; and the cognitive failings that impact a correct and timely diagnosis for any given patient. Naturally, these overlap. The book is written from the perspective of the notoriously commercialised American medical system and is around 20 years old, so doubtless some of the details are different outside of the US and have changed since pu...

I'm slowly learning German ... for fun, believe it or not.  To limit my time commitment I've been mostly studying with lessons on apps or in-person supplemented by YouTube, ChatGPT, DeepL, blogs, an ancient CD-based box set that my well-meaning parents bought in a charity shop, subtitled German-language films and ... Peppa Wutz.   I've pushed ahead in some areas, for example by completing Babbel lessons all the way to  B2  even though I'm nowhere near speaking at that level, and starting again at  A1  even though I'm well past it. Being exposed to the advanced content can give some useful context, and redoing the basics can cement understanding, reinforce learning, and make connections that were missed the first time around. What I wasn't doing was rote learning verb conjugations, grammatical structures, or vocab lists. And that was fine for a long time, at least until I got good enough to have simple conversations...