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A couple of weeks ago the Western Morning News asked me to write something for a new feature they were starting called ‘If I Ruled the World’.  “Feel free”, they wrote, “not to take it too seriously – after all (unless you know something we don’t) no one is really

So how did you set about researching the book? I was really fortunate because there are quite a few excellent researchers in Japan who have done a lot of the groundwork, and researchers overseas as well. Of course a lot of it was academic research. And again, the specialisation was

On Friday, at St John’s Church in Bridgetown, Totnes, I was the subject of a rather unusual version of Desert Island Discs.  The Winter Concert, organised by 2 local choirs, Global Harmony and Viva, and by The Bogg Boys, invites a local person to choose 8 tracks which are

One of the most extraordinary books I have read in recent years is Just Enough: lessons in living green from traditional Japan by Azby Brown. Brown is director of the Konazawa Institute of Technologies Future Design Institute and has lived in Japan for the last 30 years.  It is a

Humans are storytelling beings. In fact one could argue that it is impossible to make sense of the world without story. Storytelling is how we piece together facts, beliefs, feelings and history to form something of a coherent whole connecting us to our individual and collective past, present and future.

Exactly a year ago today I wrote a piece on this blog called The day I closed my Amazon account.  It set out why, and how, I had decided that Amazon was so at odds with my values that I was withdrawing my support for good.  It turned out to