After far too long the audio version of my book, The Bug in our Thinking and the way to fix it, is now available on Audible, iTunes and Amazon.

The book has been out for three months so I have some feedback. As those of you who have read it know already, it is an easy read but to get the full value the reader has to be patient and to work a little.

That didn’t go down well with some:

a “waste of tume (sic) and money” according to one reviewer.

Other readers had different responses:

“This is truly an amazing book and may be the solution. DO, please, read it. It is mind altering, life affirming, so helpful. Wise and funny and beautifully written. It gets to the heart of innumerable huge issues with a strong and light touch and and offers so much.”

“A remarkable achievement: a philosophy book that is both readable and worth reading.”

The Bug in our Thinking is also available as an ebook and as a paperback on Amazon. However to get the best deal for the paperback in the UK please buy it directly from me by clicking HERE. The code HERON in the coupon box will get you a £2.50 discount per order before the end of September.

I am still in Vietnam and looking sadly at the UK from afar. It is dispiriting to see bureaucracy and ideology dominating public policy. Every day brings news of more dysfunction: road and rail transport, High Streets, the NHS, schools, universities, prisons, the police, the criminal justice system, Government policies and services from HMRC to Defence, Energy and Local Government – all are decaying. The main political parties and the media are compromised. Even the Royal Society has given up on science.

So what can we do? The deluded are adept at avoiding inconvenient facts and arguments so personally I favour telling stories as I do in my book - interspersed with a few observations from phenomenology and hypnosis. But I try to avoid judgements, explanations and conclusions. I leave that to the reader's, or listener's, discretion.

The Bug in our Thinking is a small contribution to our struggle. It does not address any of the current controversies directly, so it may be more accessible to mainstreamers than overt scepticism. It is a journey through the philosophical and psychological underpinnings of the modern world view. Each reader can see for themselves how misunderstandings are established and fuelled, and how they can be remedied.

It took a long time to write that book, and yet now I must write even more in order to promote it. As is evident, I struggle to write something useful when so much has already been written and so many others are already writing so well and sharing important facts and analyses. However I also think of the babble of contemporary discourse as a frenetic conversation. If any of us can can contribute insight, discernment or proportionality we can make our colloquy a little more benign.

There are millions of good and sensible people in Britain. They are practical, modest and context-sensitive. Many, unfortunately, are a little too trusting of the authorities and the ‘experts’. Some of them have been seriously misled – perhaps with the best of intentions. Yet every day, it seems, more people are becoming aware of the gap between the mainstream narrative and reality.

There are also some less sensible citizens who have adopted a doctrinaire world view which is ideological, ungrounded and grandiose. This last group dominate our public policy-making institutions and they have no idea how deluded and out-of-touch they are. Few of them are ready to reconsider their position. They have too much invested in the status quo and, unlike Ms Sathanandan, they have not yet suffered directly from their folly.

So let’s just keep talking to the mainstreamers. Let’s tell a few stories and offer a few different points of view and a few expressions of puzzlement and uncertainty. You could even give them a copy of my book.