the Present Age

This book (available for free online from that link) by Søren Kierkegaard is a short but hella punchy treatise about the political and psychogical malaise that European modernism has left us in. The passion & activity of antiquity is gone, replaced by a blandly "democratic"* equilibrium roiling about in the seas of reflective intersubjectivity - the boons of education and understanding and the free press have left us all deeply well-informed, yet the sheer glut herein has left us existentially paralyzed when it comes to actually putting those informed understandings into action. He writes, "every one knows a great deal, we all know which way we ought to go and all the different ways we can go, but nobody is willing to move." Rebellion in such a culture is essentially unthinkable. Readers familiar with old Søren won't be surprised to hear that he concludes that the only way for individuality and society to healthily balance each other out in any meaningful sense is the rediscovery of true religion.

   This is by far and away the most accessible Kierkegaard text I've read to date - it's not technical philosophy and should be easily readable by anyone with an above-your-average-American vocabulary. A final thought - though written in the seemingly alien atmosphere of mid-19th-century Copenhagen, this prophetic text speaks to the cultural, political and psychological snafus of 2025's dim/bright crazy/inevitable future presents with sparklingly uncanny accuracy & profundity. And did I mention it's very short and is online for free? Go read it.

* Kierkegaard's polemic here has left me considerably more favourable in my view of C. S. Lewis's takes on democratic equality, which as I've said left a lot to be desired when I read them in their own context.

Unapologetic

This book by Francis Spufford is, despite his claims that it isn't an apologetic as it makes zero effort to engage with classic philosophical arguments for or against any particular theological claims, by far and away the best Christian apologetic I've ever read. I've literally just read the whole book in a single sitting* it's that good. The subtitle proclaims it as an exploration of "why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense" - and to say it achieves the goal of making a case for this with aplomb would be a grand disservice to the word aplomb. It runs its course over eight perfectly-structured chapters:

1. a general introduction; statement of intent for the book
2. the existential experience of sin, or as he translates it the Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up
3. the frustrating ineffability of God in light of people's recurrent sense of needing, if not Him, then something to fill that gap
4. the confounding problem of suffering
5. the personality, teachings, mission and passion of one Yeshua from Nazareth
6. the historically improbable paradoxes surrounding the emergence of Christianity as a coherent religion
7. the complicated legacy and situational state of the Church
8. the subjective feeling entailed in having faith that one is forgiven, and the challenges and opportunity implied herein

   It's deeply insightfully clever without being scholarly**, bewilderingly matter-of-fact in what it says and completely down-to-earth in how it says it, balancing common-sense public presumption with personal but universally recognisable experiences and dazzlingly original points that lead him into compelling conclusions without ever making anything that so much as looks like a rational argument. Spufford not only doesn't avoid the prickly areas of conversation around Christianity in its contemporary context but actively leans into them and tries to give them as much benefit of the doubt as possible, and somehow still manages to wrangle cogent and meaningful ways of sidestepping or outright neutering them. He writes with a disarming simplicity and a refreshing honesty that if such style was wider emulated by Christian authors (and indeed everyday evangelising believers) I hazard to expect that we would see a great many more folks showing interest in the faith.

   Overall, this is a more-or-less perfect example of communicating Christianity effectively in a postmodern culture. If we are presumed by the world around us to be irrational, then give up on trying to convince people by reason - and talk about what it feels like to have one's messy spiritual life wrapped up in what never has been and never will be scientifically verifiable but is indisputably salient in its psychological cohesion to those who try to believe it. If you're a Christian, read this and be inspired to draw on your own emotional experience to communicate your own faith more fluidly, with less intellectual trumps and more confounding expressivity. If you're not a Christian - this book won't convince you to become one, but it may very well provoke you to give it a bloody good consideration.

* With minor breaks only to piss, smoke, and make more coffee.

** Spufford humbly boasts in a note at the end of the book that aside from checking to ensure the accuracy of certain factual claims and quotations used, he conducted exactly no research whatsoever throughout his writing process.

Self-Constitution

This book, which I have already read since the beginning of this blog hence the link above and the shortness of this entry, is, as I stated before, easily in the top few philosophy books I've read to date. I stand by everything I said about it last time, and have nothing in particular of reflective note to add, but I will say, going through a period of my life at the moment where I have been struggling with being an effective agent in both doing and/or not doing the things that I know to be best for me, the calm, rational train of thought Korsgaard carries throughout here was a real blessing to help me reassert some semblance of control over my habits. As I said before I'd recommend this book to anyone looking to know themselves better and become a better person, regardless of how familiar you are with philosophy - though her arguments are intensely academic in nature the way she writes should be largely accessible to anyone with an above-American vocabulary.

the Concept of Anxiety

This book is "a simple psychologically oriented deliberation in view of the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin" (according to its official subtitle) by Søren Kierkegaard, the grandfather of existential philosophy. I can only say that the inclusion of "simple" in aforementioned subtitle is wholly undeserved; this was a very difficult book to read. You know those kinds of books where you know every word the author is using but have no idea how they seem to be fitting together to make the points they seem to think they are? For me, this was one of those. I would love to have some insights to make about this book but I have to admit I simply didn't understand most of it. The language is simple enough, enjoyable in places, but the trains of thought at the core of this text's argument are horribly tough knots to unravel. Maybe I will revisit this in a few years when I have more hard philosophy and theology under my belt and it might unveil something to me; but for now, unless my recitation of this book's subtitle grabbed your attention like nothing else ever has, I don't think I can recommend this book to anyone. Profound? Probably. Important? Almost certainly. Difficult? Most certainly.

How to Argue with a Cat

This book by Jan Heinrichs claims to be "a human's guide to the art of persuasion", to such extremes that you might not only be able to win arguments against other real people but even cats. Even cats!

   The principles of rhetoric, psychology, context sensitivity and body language discussed in this book are the direct claims of a professional in his field and they make tons of common sense. You will come away from this book feeling empowered to try out your newfound skills of persuasion on any human or cat you can - I did, and it didn't work, because I'm a rat at heart and struggled to get to grips with a lot of the theory. But I'd strongly recommend this one for anyone wishing to become a more persuasive, more effective person.

Know yourself through your Handwriting

This book, appropriately enough for an anonymous sheaflet from the 1970s that came for free with a box of breakfast cereal probably, would be an invaluable tool to anyone looking into psychology, criminal theory or practical forgery tips; and that's about all as I'll say on't.

Ten Days in a Mad-House

This book, a reprint of an 1887 work compiled by Ian Munro from the reports and news-clippings from intrepid journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran, a.k.a. Nellie Bly - or for the sake of her narration in here, N. Brown. I won't say much about it because Wikipedia can give you a better-sourced summation than I can be bothered to - but basically she feigned dementia/insanity for a while to see how hard it would be to get committed to an asylum, in which pursuit she could then report first-hand on the conditions of such places. She spent ten days in Blackwell's Island Asylum, having been processed through the bulk of an inept bureaucratic system up to that point. It is gross and shocking reading that makes me so grateful to God for the NHS; and to the sheer ballsiness of people like Liz Cochran / Nellie Bly for diving headlong into the messes of our world to tell the truth, and their stories amidships. Grimly fascinating, and I will be digging out more books by Nellie to see how she managed to circumnavigate the world in eight days less than Jules Verne thought probable. Following her exposé of the terrible conditions, the state of New York committed an extra $1,000,000 to the cause of properly caring for the "insane". What a woman. 

the Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet

This book by Rubem A. Alves is an absolute masterpiece of experimental poetry-prose blended theology. It is beautifully crafted, so eloquently argued that you barely notice the intellectual cogs spinning until you're caught up in their imaginative wake like a thrall to transfixing, almost blinding in places, truth: God is love, and life, and all good, and we get by grace to participate in his nature through faith, acceptance as we are accepted... I'm rambling but this central point of enliveningness as central to the Gospel imperative makes up the core of this book, only Alves unpacks it in such glorious terms that it seems petty, redundant even, to try to do better justice than a zealous quasi-anonymous blurb.

   Strongly recommended for people who are spiritually exploring the world more; you will meet an incredible Jesus presented here even if you've never opened a Bible... I'm stopping short of saying this book is 'divinely inspired', but then what is divinity, and what is inspiration? And if you cannot show me how to draw the line between the two, then I will remain trusting the enforcement, theologically speaking, of that boundary to God and Him in Trinity alone.

All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome

This book by Kathy Hoopman is an entertaining, if thoroughly dishonest at surface level, exploration of the similarities between cat behaviours and common personality traits of persons with the higher-functioning autistic spectrum disorder often called Asperger's - not super educational on either front for most practical purposes but an interesting and somewhat amusing conceptual mishmash.

Depression & Other Magic Tricks

This book, a collection of poetry by Sabrina Benaim, is broadly themed and toned as you'd expect from the title: a hard-hitting series of world-weary sarcastic-yet-sympathetic reflections on what we do when the Black Dog comes to visit, how we put up with it, explain its housekeeping to others, feed it, take it for walks, etcetera. I felt myself quite deeply reflected in some of these - the minutiae, the tiny borderline-inexplicable agonies, the moments of unadulterated bliss when the fog lifts for a minute or a day - Benaim has written a highly-relatable collection here that never skews or preaches its perspective but paints instead a dynamic series of complex murals, yet laid out in clear strokes. Powerful comfort reading for anyone who has also found themselves adrift in conversations with a doctor or parent or in half-imagined hypothetical reworkings of memories and encounters; sometimes there's just too much noise underwater to make sense of it all, and we fail and feel worse for doing so, but when writers like Sabrina manage to articulate these sinks or cliff-edges in recognisably intuitive chunks of sheer language - it basically is magic, and it will let its reader feel far less alone in the world for hearing so done well.

Sign my Citalopram

This book is a collection of conversational poems by Hannah Chutzpah produced by The Spirit of the Rainbow Heron, a Sheffield-based mental health advocacy group. I really enjoyed this book, it being one of those rare cases of poetry collections that are generous enough to play down the literary subtleties and so make a less intellectually taxing read, but that utterly drip with authenticity, relatable quirks, and character - I teared up at a few and laughed out loud at a few others, and it's really not often a poet will make me do both in the same book. Dealing with themes of self-confidence, power and permissiveness, the narratives in this collection are drawn brilliantly and slice neat wedges of psychological & sociological insights into social interactions and the mental health implications bubbling along under the surfaces of these; overall the book makes for an extremely life-affirming read and did to me the best which anyone can hope their poetry does for anyone else - making them feel less alonely odd in the world, giving them true things to latch onto that are far from unattainable by helping unlock them in the reader themself. Not to say humour or art or attitude alone can cure any mental ailments, but if you're a sufferer and you've never tried to read your way out into some happier less turbulent places, give it a go - you'd be surprised.

Reasons to Stay Alive

This book by Matt Haig (much like this one but moreso) is a mishmash: part personal testimonial about mental health and what happens when it goes extremely wrong in context of one's life; part rambling disjointed (at least he's constructed it to feel like that but it flows like triple-ply clockwork toilet paper) meditation on all of this, and how it is going to be differently similar for everyone 'experiencing' it from whatever point of view.
   In a straightforwardly practical empathetic sense I honestly don't think I've come across a better descriptive walkthrough of what it's like to suffer depression and/or anxiety, and similarly the reflections (drawn from both reliably-common-sense research and Haig's own brush with a suicidal inkling) on supporting loved ones going through this are probably some of the more grounded, helpful and well-put bits of advice I've seen given to General Readers on the subject.
   I've been put off reading this book for the last couple of years despite seeing it all over the place on bestseller lists* because - frankly, because I've been scared of the degree to which my own mental health is not entirely stable and I resented the idea that anyone would need to receive reasons for this Very Obvious Thing from a book. But all that said and thought, I found this book so moving and raw and real and just honestly humanly hopeful that I'd recommend it with gusto - particularly good for friends or relatives of someone unduly-acquainted with the black dog.
   For people in such a situation themselves it may help but first up I can't make book recommendations over the Real Important Shit of 1. getting help BEFORE the situation becomes dire & 2. see 1... Mind and the Samaritans both offer free support and can be a real lifeline.**



* When 'how-and-why-to' guides for not killing yourself are bestsellers, it should maybe be a bit of a clue that you live in a somewhat Fucked society. Meh

** Not to disparage though as I've got a hefty hunch Haig's book has probably gone some significant way toward saving many lives. Which - you never know whether you may have helped someone in some way like this before either. Or maybe you do. Mental health can often be a silent killer and so if you know someone who is struggling - don't wait for things to stew, be better as a friend & help each other through this shit

the Little Book of Colour

This book by Karen Haller proclaims, per its subtitle, that it will informatively equip its reader to better transform their lives utilising the psychology of colour. I didn't even know there was such a thing - apart from, of course there is, and it's mindblowingly subtle & powerful in its everyday constant potency. The kinda thing you never think about until you do then you can't ever unsee it - or remove from your daily awareness of such a basic thing as colour some residual echoes of the backdrop; each colour's psychological hefts - which are affected partly by cultural context and personal taste, but weirdly there's a deep-rooted similitude in how colours affect people's brains. What it may make someone think or feel is impossible to neatly predict, as everyone processes things differently and most common colours have widely variably symbolic purposes in different cultures - but I learnt from Haller that each colour actually triggers particular neurological responses and these are pretty consistent across human diversity... which means that carefully chosen & crafted combinations of colours tend to induce reliable effects in those perceiving them.* Visually delicious and accessibly written, this was a fascinating surprise: I bought it for my sister's birthday & ended up reading it all in about an hour and a half on the coach before she got it.

* Obviously yes, there's a good two or three chapters exploring meaty applications of all this theory in workplaces, home decor and personal fashion.

Jesus: Ph.D. Psychologist

This book by Tom Bruno was a hard and highly rewarding read. Regular followers of this blog may know my mental health isn't always great and neither is my faith, so reading a book that basically lays out my personal Lord and Saviour as being the perfect archetype of psychological wellbeing was a bit too close to like conducting rather aggressively on-the-nose theological therapy on myself. Needless to say I made lots of notes, had lots of arguments with God, prayed a lot, cried a lot, and came out the other side somewhat less lost in my own head and somewhere closer to stability of thought and feeling rooted in a more settled personal effort to offer my life to Christ each day, each moment. Which, my goodness, I probably can't credit this book alone as having done because lots of other shit has been kicking off in my life during the span of reading this, and I've been reading lots of other stuff too, but I may as well give credit where credit's due.

   Bruno writes clearly, using actual psychology alongside stories of Jesus' life and teaching to illuminate the wholesome principles laid out in each chapter - which explore how Jesus (despite being a mere carpenter from a backwater town under Roman occupation 2000 years ago) may be deserving of an honorary doctorate in psychotherapy for the following pointers:

• Take the inward journey
• Focus
• It is up to us
• Have purpose in life
• Keep the inner child alive
• Work through your fears
• Know yourself
• Ask for what you want
• Stay in touch with your feelings
• Don't worry
• Keep your heart pure
• Learn how to transcend the valleys
• Stop blaming others
• Work a program
• Retain a dynamic view of life
• Use your gifts wisely
• Manage your anger
• Retreat before you charge
• Take control of your life
• Believe that you can change your life
• Stop searching for happiness
• Be thankful
• Plant
• Love may be difficult
• Empower people (especially women)
• Love is the priority
• Speak as a man to men
• Forgiveness must be a part of your life
• Accept people where they are, and challenge them
• Seek truth and freedom
• Keep in contact with the highest power
• Know how to listen
• Stop chasing what you can't keep
• Loosen up and laugh
• No quick-fixes

   After these digestible chapter-insights, there's a final chapter exploring the nature of discipleship on the sinner's human psyche and how liberating it can be to love, be loved by and imitate Jesus Christ, who acts as the catalyst for all growth into mental and spiritual health. There's an appendix helping programmatize this for a flexible range of personal struggles too, though I haven't used this. It looks similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous use though so it's probably got a strong track-record.

   Overall, the book is a treasure trove of practical insight into how being better attuned to, and in control of, one's own behaviour and reactions, in the flux of feelings and ideas and relationships and an ever-changing sinful world, can help us not only draw nearer to God but achieve deeper and sturdier mental wellbeing. Each chapter has a few really helpful reflection questions at the end of it too, so you can work your shit out in real time as you read through. And no, you can't borrow my copy, it's full of far too much of exactly this.

the Inner Voice of Love

This book by Henri J. M. Nouwen was another raw example of God throwing unexpected reading recommendations at me which were precisely what I needed to read. Looking for another book by Nouwen on discernment, I stumbled across this, and realizing it was a journal he'd kept in the depths of a six-month spiral-dive into depression and only allowed to be published eight years later after realizing his insights gained from the period spent in darkness helped mould much of the spiritual core in his later influential works, decided it was the best place for me (who had not been as far-gone as Henri when writing this but in a pretty grim place most of the past year or three) to get an introduction to the man. "I moved from anguish to freedom, from depression to peace, from despair to hope... All the agony that threatened to destroy my life now seems like the fertile ground for greater trust, stronger hope, and deeper love", he writes on the blurb, and this struck a chord with me on the ways God had already intervened and developed my relationship with him in the danknesses of the period I hope to be starting to emerge from. A deep thinker and profoundly god-hearted feeler here wrestling his way through one of those curveballs our brains can sometimes be wont to throw us; certainly worth a read, especially for Christian readers who struggle with depression, or want better to support others who do.

Adulthood is a conversation about what we used to do as kids

This book* by Raluca de Soleil** is an absolute treasure. Some quivering with righteous and articulate rage, some fluttering like reflective sage moths between the light cast by the drives to expressively unify oneself and the shadows cast of traumas we should rightly be wary of how we talk about, more still dancing wholesome pirouettes of singular pure poetic "well, and that's like how that is, right?"***

* Because she self-published I wasn't sure where the best place to direct that link was. If you're interested in trying to get your hands on a copy probably best to ask her via message on her artist facebook page.

** A true poet-peer of mine on the Sheffield spoken word scene. In fact we both had our first ever open-mic experience at the same event, a Mental Health Matters night called Speak Your Mind; we were both very nervous, until we smashed it and weren't anymore, and I'm delighted to still belong to that wonderful community; "not with entitlement, but safety and uncharted possibility" [quote from one of her's].

*** Of course right.

Notes on a Nervous Planet

This book by Matt Haig is a punchily honest & disarmingly thoughtful series of reflections on how we can try to maintain our mental health in a world increasingly beholden by all of our modern era's weirdnesses, stresses, etc: drawing on everyday biographical snippets and pretty robust common sense this book skips around a lot but weaves together a bright cogent narrative of our Real Living Selves, navigating political chaos, new technologies, & all the myriad fuckeries these bring to bear on our poor battered brains. Personally I got a lot of encouraging ammunition from this book to apply to my own struggles with the stuff Haig* talks about here; I'd highly recommend this to anyone similarly looking for some kind of individual stability and reasonableness throughout the bluster that is becoming of this fucking decade.

* Btw it is indeed same author as this fantastic novel, which in itself was inspired by Haig's own disassociative experiences with extreme depression & anxiety, as further unpacked in this other more testimonial work.

A Philosophy of Walking

This book by Fréderic Gros is, as the title suggests, a philosophical stroll through the nature and psycho-biosocial mechanics of, and historically-significant figures associated with that simplest human means of locomotion. Or should I say perambulation? Probably. It deals in utter magnificently eloquent terms with the silences, solitudes, slownesses and strangely metaphysically inspiring spaces found when one walks: Nietzsche, Nerval, Rousseau, Kant, Rimbaud, Thoreau and Gandhi get their own chapters examining the purposes and uses of the "art" of pedestrian travel; I'm fairly sure the book was written as such that this shines through the text but it may be a facet of just my own over-egged poetic reading, that the book works even more fantastically than it presumably still does otherwise should one take the whole notional field of "walking" as the metaphor for the dogged, day-by-day, step-by-step human travel through their own life - I certainly found it yielded many insights personally that were not necessarily there in the text itself with a grasp of such in the halfway-back of my mind. I loved this book and you can very probably expect to see a second post on here about it in the years to come, on the inevitable re-read.

Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity & Integrity

This book by Christine Korsgaard is quite possibly in my top three or four philosophical books I've read, period. I had read sections of it alongside this a few years ago when I was doing an undergraduate essay on conceptions of agency in practical reason, earmarking it as a book to revisit and properly digest later on - this time not for mere academicalism but to properly imbibe of and benefit from the potency of insights she makes herein.

   Synthesizing ideas from Plato, Aristotle and Kant, alongside her own formidable weight of intellectual reflective handling of such diverse themes of psychological behaviouralism, the questions of what makes a person effective at being a person, how we respond at all to things like goodness or rightness; the ground covered here is incredibly holistic in scope and yet holds together into a cohesive train of argument that never dithers on the fences of empty philosophizing but consistently returns to the fertile soil of pragmatic, day-to-day human lived application - which is what all true philosophy should be and do, imho. I'm not going to pretend a cogent synthetic summary of the ideas contained herein is at all within either the intentional or possible parameters of my writing this post, but to give a roughly hazarded breakdown of what I think she's getting at in this book - it is the very question of what it means to live well, how a human person can conceptualize themselves in practical ways in relation to ideas about goodness and reason in a world so often devoid of either in the immediate circumstances; and how constantly choosing to cultivate one's own identity in line with notions of goodness, rational truth and whatnot ultimately shape the meaningful essence of our identities - how well we do this developing what she refers to as our integrity. She does shine some excellently critical lights into the murkier what-if corners of our failures to do this as well - with such problematic elements of human being as ignorance, moral failure, and incoherent aspects of our constituted beings all being dealt with generously and in my opinion rather satisfactorily. One small gripe I would take with it is that she deals primarily with autonomy and agency in these senses with regard to the individual, and so much of the kind of organic intersubjectivity that shapes, for good or ill, our capacities and efficacies in the pursuits talked about in this book aren't given the scrutiny I would have been keen to hear her delve into - but this is a small trifle when one considers how much truly helpful ground she has otherwise covered - no doubt that side of things is something she has talked about elsewhere,* or may someday.

   As you'd probably guess from an Oxford University Press book, it is pretty dense reading and though Korsgaard writes excellently and this is much more accessible than a majority I think of typical books in this kind of ballpark, it would still be a bit of a hard go for those who haven't delved previously into the mindfields of psychological philosophy - but I'd say probably most people seriously willing to give their brains a bit of a workout could handle this book relatively easily, so long as you don't expect it to be the kind of thing you can just bash out in a few afternoons, and are happy to google the occasional word. And yes, I would very much recommend this book to basically anyone as the insights contained in it are so life-givingly pragmatic and reasonable that it would be an excellent book to anyone - so if you'd like to take the plunge and give your own grasp at being a coherent person a long hard thought-stare, I heartily recommend Christine Korsgaard's work as a springboard - and though I can't say I'm a scholar I'm confident enough this is a good starting point.

* I am speculating here - sadly, as I am no longer a student of any university, my access to philosophy books is now considerably more limited, as they're bloody expensive, and they won't let me in the student libraries with quite the same degree of welcome as I once had.

A Monk's Guide to a Clean House and Mind

This book by Shoukei Matsumoto was as disappointingly materialistic as it was wishy-washily platitudinous. I'm not sure what I was expecting from a book with a title like this, but it pretty much is just comprised of a list of possible chores and household maintenance tasks appendaged with cloying and repetitive discussions of how these particular tasks, performed with attentive deliberation, mindfully and carefully, can (enormous surprise) help the cleaner develop meditative states and attitudes. This is not something that anyone who's ever done a thorough spring clean needs explaining - I was hoping that this book would shed some deeper insight into Zen Buddhist philosophies around material objects and stewarding them well, perhaps also cultural or psychological nuggets of interestingness as to how one may approach these tasks in such a way as to bring about such states; at the very least partial repressedly-angry tirade against Western society's lazy-affluent carpet-hoovering torpor. But no! Aside from the pleasant regular illustrations and the occasional spots of discussion which do actually acknowledge the global historical contexts of the advice contained herein (many of these are couched in sections included apparently to sole aims of explicating a certain item of Japanese home cleaning-ware), I'm sad to say it's hard to describe this book as anything more or less than a list of domestic to-maybe-do's padded out with samey almost-ironic-in-their-extremity-of-sincere-mundane-devotion* broad generalisations associating housework with purity, love, life, enlightenment, and all that jazz. I'll finish with a selected quote to show you what I mean: "Dishes must be carefully held in both hands. Holding things in this way displays a sense of natural sophistication and shows that you take care of each and every thing you hold." So, there probably are some people who would enjoy this book, but for me, in a cruel twist of fate it has become one of the few of my acquisitions to have been updated in its material-possession status - to clutter.

* Is that maybe just what Zen Buddhism is like? And if so, is this whole post xenophobic?**

** Maybe it wasn't until I asked this in an asterisk!? Oh dear, what a minefield.