A close friend of mine suggested a while ago that we did something a bit different. “How do you fancy climbing Mount Snowden in the middle of the night to watch the sun rise from the summit on the summer solstice?” she asked. It seemed a good idea in the middle of winter when we booked it. Last weekend, me and...
Whilst eating dinner with family and friends recently we happened upon the subject of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (not unsurprisingly as it’s my husband’s favourite topic) whereupon I started to feel a little anxious. You see my ‘internal’ fight or flight, reptilian brain, response to ‘AI’ is: ‘It’s scary, it’s going to take all our jobs before taking over the entire world and...
When I was 28 I met my guardian angel! ...well, at the very least he was an incredibly kind man... My acting career (which of course had been non-stop) was dwindling, I was about to become homeless and my love life was well, pretty similar to my acting career - non-existent. I faced the prospect of moving out of London and...
Someone once famously said to Bill Shankly: 'To you, football is a matter of life or death!' To which he replied: 'Listen, it's more important than that.’ As we enter the business end of the World Cup, we have already seen a wide range of life-or-death emotions, both on and off the pitch. These have been from players, managers, supporters and...
Have you ever wondered what people think about you? In particular, what’s their first impression of you? The warm up exercise for Laughology’s Unconscious Bias session, asks the audience to answer some questions about the trainer, based purely on what the person delivering looks like and the few words that they have, thus far, uttered. When running a course last week,...
There were many enduring photos of the spectacle that was the Royal Wedding over the weekend. One memorable image was the miserable trout pout worn by Victoria Beckham who clearly missed the memo that explained it was not a funeral, but a day of celebration, happiness and joy. Mrs Beckham wandered around with a face devoid of any jubilation and looked...
‘Mini-beasts’ is a popular summer term topic in infant classes around the country. Young children will be learning about these amazingly resilient creatures and the fantastic things that they achieve. Mini-beasts show tremendous backbone, despite not having an actual backbone, being incredibly small and easily squishable. Currently, there are a lot of news headlines about the pressures on teachers and the...
“The world economy no longer pays you for what you know; Google knows everything. The world economy pays you for what you can do with what you know.” – Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills for the OECD. We are, it appears living in a world of unprecedented change, which is giving rise to a severe skills gap. According to inaugural...
We know that, if adults in homes and schools are happy, then the children around them are more likely to be happy too. Similarly, when children are happy, it rubs off on us grown-ups. Well, it does usually. I am writing this at 7am on Sunday morning, having come away for a leisurely weekend to a beautiful village in deepest, darkest...
