I have never smoked a single cigarette. No teenage rebelliousness behind the bike sheds at school, no furtive trips to the corner shop to cadge ciggies off kindly store owners.   Steve Latham   It’s not that I thought I was better than my peers at school. No, I was […]

In a pluralistic society, it is imperative that we understand each other, and not simply project our own preconceptions onto people.   Steve Latham   Even where we vehemently disagree, we need to listen to what the other person is actually saying, and not what we think they’re saying. Too […]

Until I was seventeen, I had short hair, and listened to the classical records my dad bought, and which we played on Sundays, while we ate lunch.   Steve Latham   Then I changed. My hair grew, my jeans became blue, sporting the widest flairs imaginable – and my musical […]

I used to derive some comfort from Edward De Bono’s work on “Lateral thinking”. He claimed that his new approach contrasted with vertical, logical, thinking.   Steve Latham   To explain the difference, he used the example digging holes. Conventional intellectual endeavour, he said, was like digging a single hole. […]