Modern corporate life can feel like one long round of meetings after another. We jump from zoom call to teams call, with the occasional face to face meeting thrown in. While learning that we can collaborate with people regardless of location during lockdown was a huge breakthrough, it has also made it ridiculously easy to arrange meetings for anything and everything. This can be a big problem for some of us. Like many neurodivergent people,…
Do you have your summer wardrobe sorted yet? Have you considered the styles and colours that will be on trend to pull together the looks you will be modelling as you make everywhere you go into your catwalk? No, me neither. I have long since given up paying any attention at all to the ever changing preferences of fashion (unless I cannot buy the same clothes that I have worn for years because they are…
You may well have never heard of the Sinclair C5. If you have you are almost certainly, like me, a child of the 1980s or even earlier. The C5 was an electric recumbent tricycle devised and launched by the great inventor and entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair in 1985. It did not last long. While it had several issues, notably the safety of riding a very low and small vehicle on the road with cars and…
It really amazes me how some discoveries are made. Take chocolate. Cocoa beans on their own, I understand, taste pretty rank. I can attest to the fact that even when processed into 100% cocoa solid chocolate, the taste is, at best, challenging. To get from the pods in the tree to what we would recognise as chocolate today takes an incredibly complex, multi-stage process. How did anyone just stumble upon that? The same is true…
Awards shows are everywhere these days, especially at this time of year. While I am not a big fan of most of these, the award that does often amuse me is for best newcomer in a field. Invariably, the winner may be new to most of the audience but has actually been working hard and unnoticed for years to get to this point. They are not a newcomer at all, just new to a decent…
Hi Mark It’s me, Mark. I know this is weird, but let’s go with it, ok? But just in case you don’t make it to the end of this letter, please hear this: there is nothing wrong with you, no matter what anyone else tells you or wants you to believe. You are neurodivergent. You are autistic, ADHD, and dyspraxic, but that is not a bad thing. These labels are not diseases that need to…
If your organisation has more than a few staff, it is highly likely that you have autistic employees. At least 1 in 100 people are autistic, and some studies put the numbers even higher. Autistic people often make great employees, yet unemployment rates in the autistic community are around 70-80%. Even when autistic people do secure a job, they may find it difficult to stay. So why could the autistic people in your organisation be…
Despite being dyspraxic and having no coordination whatsoever, I am a brilliant juggler. I can juggle all day and juggle all sorts of different items. As long as there is only one item to juggle. Two at a push if they are small, but then I am pushing my luck. Who said juggling had to use more than one item anyway?! We all do a lot of juggling in our busy modern lives. We juggle…
Can you remember the party from your 1st birthday? How about your second, or even your third? No, me neither. That’s normal, because, if we are being honest, birthday parties for very young children are not for the benefit of the child at all. They will receive some gifts, and two- or three-year-olds may even be up for a chaotic game of pass the parcel, but that is not the reason for the party. Birthday…
I love reading spy novels and thrillers, but very few works of fiction are as gripping as the true story of the breaking of the enigma code. During World War 2, a team of code breakers led by the great Alan Turing carried out extraordinary work to crack the supposedly unbreakable cipher that the Nazis were using. While they did build one of the first computers as part of this work, the vast majority of…