How Cricket Saved My Life

An honest, often sad but humorous account of life inside a body that no longer does as it is told!

Ian Martin was a sports-loving youngster. When he realised he was more enthusiastic than talented enough to make a career out of playing sport he left home and joined the Royal Navy. This book tells the story of his experiences at sea onboard HMS Ark Royal, his service during the first Gulf War on HMS London and his subsequent medical discharge after being diagnosed with a neuro-muscular condition. Ian talks about the impact of the diagnosis, his deterioration and mental health battles and how cricket helped him transition into a wheelchair and to him finding himself, and a new career.

It’s a tale of rejection, dreams, discovery, determination, resilience and, ultimately, success via the floors of many hotel bathrooms and scrapes with airport security.

How Hard Can It Be?

So how exactly would you cook a bat?

And what did Jesus get up to between being born in a stable in a hail of publicity, up until he appeared again at about 33 complete with a beard and an NVQ in carpentry?

Questions like this are what happens when a middle-aged, overweight bloke has a mid-life crisis, buys a bike and decides to cycle, unsupported and with minimal training from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

Whilst the actual journey itself is covered in the book in a self-deprecating humorous style of the author, as his physically inadequate body and lack of training battle against the lack of comfort provided by a 2-inch wide saddle along with gravity and nature seemingly working against him for every mile, it is more about the thoughts he has while away from home with nothing else to think about other than pushing the left pedal followed by the right, followed by the left. And the responses to his thoughts from work colleagues, friends and family.

How Have I Cheated Death? A Short and Merry Life With Cystic Fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is one of the UK's most common life-threatening diseases, affecting over 10,000 people. There's currently no cure.

Not all that long ago, a CF diagnosis meant an early death. Tim Wotton is one such sufferer, who was told from an early age that he would not live beyond his 17th birthday. One of the oldest survivors of this crippling disease, How Have I Cheated Death? is a diary of his 39th year, a countdown to the illusive 40.
A story of triumph over adversity, this compelling chronicle, the first book written by a CF sufferer at 40, offers hope and inspiration, demonstrating what cannot be cured needs to be endured. Written with great honesty and humour with an enlightening Foreword by the actress Jenny Agutter, this profound account is a testament to the daily dedication required to deal with CF and recently diagnosed diabetes while managing a normal family life.

How It All Began

A most entertaining, amusing and gripping memoir, rich in action and packed with interesting characters, often in diverse places.

This thrill-seeking brave adventurer leaves the reader in awe of life on the move in the years before modern technology, devoid of the internet, mobile phones, travel guides and credit cards.

She paints a vivid picture of various countries throughout the globe. The many forms of transport undertaken to various destinations and the colourful characters she met along the way.

During times which will never be experienced again. Through war-torn countries, many under civil unrest, behind the Iron Curtain, and across deserts and mountains.

This true story is bound to enthral and also inspire. Her descriptions are told with candid honesty, dotted with humour and history, and is bound to please readers of all ages.

A completely captivating memoir that will keep the reader engrossed to the very last page.

How the Universe Operates

Why do the heavenly bodies behave in a contrary fashion to what we are familiar with on earth?
Before a wheel can turn, we must ensure rim is joined to axle; before a couple can dance in circle, their hands must be joined. In contrast, the planets circle the sun and the moons circle the planets without any securing mechanism, and so precisely that their movements can be predicted to a millisecond. Again, why is it that, released from the effects of gravity, emollient matter like water or molten lead forms spontaneously into tiny globes, copying the form found in stars, planets and the sun? Are the tides satisfactorily explained by the thesis of gravitational ‘pull’ of moon and sun? If so, why does modern science have such difficulty reconciling the relative influences of these two bodies? What sort of reality is light, and why is the speed of light fixed and not infinite, at least in space?
Answers to these and other questions may be found through recourse to the philosophy of Aristotle. The thinkers of the Enlightenment chose to discard Aristotle’s limited natural science. That was understandable. But they chose to discard his philosophy as well. This was unwise, as fresh study of Aristotle’s thinking will show.

How to BE the Change We Need

Why doesn’t our politics ‘do what it says on the tin’? What on earth happened to ‘Truth’, ‘Responsibility’, ‘Honesty’ and ‘Trust’? The words and concepts have long been familiar. They are all ‘on the tin’, so to speak. But not much sign, anywhere, of putting them into practice!

So what actually needs to change? Not just our values or our ideas but, surely, our behaviour, our habits. We don’t just need a description of the changes we want to see, but an understanding of how we can BE those changes. And this is where meditation comes in.

Meditation not just as thinking, but as actions that we practise until they become habits. To enable us not only to think differently about politics but to develop forms of awareness that enable us to respond more effectively – with greater self-knowledge, imagination and sensitivity.

So this is a book for us to practise with, and the final section is a practical guide to meditation methods.

The details of the meditation practices are derived largely from the philosophical and psychological teachings of Buddhism, but the book is intended for those of any faith (or none) or of any political persuasion.

So enjoy: perhaps this book will make all the difference!

How to do Christmas with Paul Dart

Looking for inspiration to transform your home for Christmas? Decorations that will excite and exhilarate family and friends?

Take a peek into the home of a designer who knows from years of practice the easy way to achieve stunning seasonal decorations that will have you creating new and exciting ways of filling your house and garden with the joys of Christmas. Full of practical tips, from tackling the perennial task of dressing the tree, on how to plan the colour scheme, how to tackle the question of ‘taste’ at this time of year and, most of all, how to enjoy the the task of transforming your home into a moment of visual wonder and delight for all of your friends and family.

How to Educate and Empower Your Patients - To Improve Outcomes, to Enable Self-Care, to Reduce Costs. A Point by Point Guide for Health Care Providers

If You Have Patients, This New Book is for You

• Here is a point-by-point guide that is keenly insightful and immediately useful.
• If you deal with patients in any way, this book is for you – doctors, nurses, therapists, dentists, counsellors, managers, advocates, and insurers. Written for the international scope of health care providers.
• Inside you will find the keys to getting patients to partner with you for their care, resulting in great benefits.    
• This book is a concise but detailed guide to the art and science of educating patients well enough to empower them.
• Get the best advice from a Patient Education Specialist who spent over 25 years educating patients.  
• Written clearly in plain language to demonstrate the approach to take when educating your patients.
• Each chapter works as an independent unit, yet they all work together.
• Contains multiple checklists that summarize key points, making implementation clear and simple.

How to Lead a School

Targeted primarily at those running a school, or contemplating doing so, this book talks frankly about the pleasures and pitfalls of the job, common to all schools across the world. Each chapter considers in detail the different constituencies a Principal or Head will encounter.

The book endorses good practice, highlights some tricks of the trade, asks questions to provoke thinking, and includes imaginary case studies.

Covid-19 may have disrupted conventional ways of education but has not significantly re-defined school leadership. Rather, it has put even greater pressure on school leaders to meet the demands of their existing constituencies. So this is a handy ‘go-to’ guide, written from experience of over 20 years in senior leadership, as a school inspector and as a member of several school boards.

It’s not another manual on leadership theory because it concentrates on immediate practical responses to the landscape a school leader will face, including a final chapter on personal well-being and how to survive the unexpected.

Human Desire Towards Determination

The world is not what it seems! The adventures in a person’s life can be of all types. However, the underlying meaning in life will always be the same.

This book is based on the travels of a woman through the adventures of life, where the only constant support came from beyond. Being lifted by angels helped her in her determination to survive and strive in life, and certainly modified her dreams for the future after discovering the world beyond the normal life.

Human Model

In Human Model, Dr. Issam Wadi summarises and explains more than 40 years of professional and academic research into human and social behaviour. He examines important aspects in our lives by showing how human and social systems are deeply influenced by universal, natural processes. He shows how research in the natural and social sciences can help to illuminate complex human processes, using friction theory to explain how human beings relate to one another, how resonance theory provides us with a better understanding of mass behaviour, advertising, and marketing, and how feedback theory explains human behaviour from a management perspective.

Drawing these parallels between natural and human systems helps to illustrate the way that human beings are embedded within larger, natural processes, as well as supplying a much clearer and easy to understand approach for readers and researchers. With the starting blocks in place, one can then begin to use proven scientific theories and social models to develop more sophisticated analyses and studies of complex social behaviour, from mass movements and crowd psychology to financial markets and economic forecasting.

This book is an important milestone in the modelling and understanding of human social behaviour and aims to contribute both to a broader mainstream understanding of these fields and further research through these versatile social modelling tools. Human Model also explains the author’s own ‘Zero Sum Theory’ for explaining happiness in life and how this can be affected by the individual’s own mental models, while providing further reflections on the impact of technology on modern life, social behaviour, the family, and society more broadly.

Humble Beginnings

This is a simple tale of a family of eight children (six girls and eventually two boys) who lived in a village in South Devon.

There are some aspects of this story that will make you laugh and plenty that will make you think, but I hope that you will persevere and read on until you get to the “gems” at the end of the main story - they will certainly give you something to consider. They are not fantasy, nor wishful thinking - they are all true!

Here are just a few highlights, there are many, many more:

• A child’s unswerving belief in her best “friend”
• The end of a cherished swimsuit
• The German doctor who became Sheila’s saviour
• Moments of fame in a talent competition
• Adventures with Georgina the goat
• How Sheila and Ivor dealt with the “Agricultural Lease” attached to their property
• The merits and unbelievable talents of Sheila’s Husband Ivor
• The wonderful Soul Rescues (because of COVID) that even now are taking place
• Successful spiritual healings and Sheila’s Mother’s “out-of-body” experience (not to be missed!)

This story is a mixture of magic in a way - not the Harry Potter kind but real magic - certainly, a lot of sadness but tons and tons of happiness also but read it and realise that life is for living and that passing (there is no death) is something to look forward to, not to dread.  

Please read my story – you will be glad you did!