Monday, November 28, 2005

Alternative Medicine Interviews

as you may know I'm doing a series of interviews with alternative medicine practitioners for my web site http://www.healthandgoodness.com . I'm really enjoying them. I could get info on therapies from books or web sites, but the interviews give a real life to what I write.

Some of the interviewees have found the process very interesting too. Often they say they work with it all the time but having to distil out what makes their therapy special is very difficult.

I have grand plans for this bit of the web site - I intend that by the end of August 2006 I will have 10,000 therapists listed in the free international listing section, that I will have interviews for most of the therapies, that there will be a glossary covering words like chakra etc., that there will be a big symptom list cross-referenced to the therapies, and that there will be a summary of some of the positive research on alternative medicine. A major project but I'm excited about it

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Christmas Stress

It’s sad that many of us associate Christmas with stress rather than happiness. This can be because we are not with the people we want to be with. It can be because we are with people we don’t want to be with. It can be because we feel there is too much to do, or not enough money to do what we want.

Quite a few years ago I decided I would answer the question - have you had a nice Christmas? - truthfully. Instead of saying something non-commital, I told people the truth - I'm not a fan of Christmas and I find it stressful. I was amazed at the number of people who looked totally relieved and said something like "I feel like that it - it's wonderful to find someone who also feels like that." Now things are more in the open, but still many of us feel the pressure to enjoy it.

If you flinch at any mention of Christmas prior to mid December, my defence is that I write a monthly column for my local newspaper and they've asked me to write about Christmas and stress for the December edition (out next week).

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Babies, Web Sites & Journalism

What a mixture but it makes life interesting.

Last week I went on a journalism course at the Arvon foundation. Fascinating. I really enjoyed it - I learnt a lot about how to write a feature article and worked on one article specifically - about eating dirty food. I hoope to get this finished this week and submit it to a national newspaper - The Times, The Sunday Times and the Daily Mail were all suggested by the tecahers so watch that space on that one..

On the way back I got to see my new grandson again - Max was looking a lot less red than when I last saw him on the day he was born - he's now 2 weeks old .. I won't bore you with telling you how wonderful he is.

In my absence John has been working on our new web site http://www.sportandme.com - it's not up officially yet, but you can see what we're doing by going to that URL.