Andrew Christophers has written Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business, as he steps back from Brand Genetics, the marketing consultancy he co-founded 25 years ago.  He is essentially sharing his tips for success, rooted in the direct experience of growing a business from his kitchen table to one with a £6.1m turnover (December 2021).

Having read his book, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brand Genetics will flourish without him in a hands-on role – and that’s the greatest compliment.

Andrew claims that Brand Genetics has achieved success through being a “human-first” organisation. His book unpacks what this means, using photographs, real-life stories and a nice big font with summaries of key take-outs at the end of each chapter.  (It is a marketing consultancy after all.)

It’s distinctly lacking in pomposity and, with the slight exception of the section on Mutant Marketing, jargon-free. The book follows an A-to-Z structure, with insights appearing in alphabetical, rather logical, order. It essentially makes the book a selection of anecdotes, like pearls on a necklace. To me, this is a human-first, approach – presenting the nuggets as insights from a well-lived life rather than a thesis. Andrew says that Michael, one of his members of staff, used to joke about some of Brand Genetics work, saying: “that’s all very well in practice, but what’s the theory?” Scrap the theory – that’s what I say.

This is a book about scaling up a start-up, but it resonated with my experience of working in charities, medium-sized businesses, and global corporations too. What he says about delegation and trusting younger people to do the work will be appreciated by micro-managed employees in organisations of every size.

I took strength from his JFDI section which was about the importance of making decisions.  “I once read that the best managers don’t make better decisions, they just make more decisions,” he says.  Yes! Absolutely!  I hereby take “Just F***ing Do It” as my modus operandi.

The most surprising tip came from his Never Stop section. I thought it a universal rule of business that you never have someone in the job at the time you need them.  By the time you have identified the need, made the business case, signed off the job description, advertised the post, interviewed and waited for the new employee to hand in their notice, you are so busy doing the work yourself that you don’t have time to induct the new employee into the role. Was it not ever thus? (Or is that just the way it works in the circles where I hang out?)

Brand Genetics has an interesting take on this. They try to hire good people BEFORE they need them, knowing they will need them one day. There’s something I never thought of before… “Never Stop selling, and never stop recruiting either,” says Andrew.

The most touching anecdote came in Y is for You, which was about being your true self at work. From the style of his book, it’s easy to imagine that Andrew is a bit of an operator in business. He admits that he was good at putting on a suit and playing the game. Who’s to say that his business wasn’t just like all the others – where the guys at the top deliver a nice patter about employee-care but are no different from anyone else in reality?

I found myself believing that Brand Genetics really was a human-first business when Andrew admits that putting on a suit and playing the game came at a cost of being true to himself. He says he didn’t want that. And he wanted everyone at Brand Genetics to be their true selves, warts and all. So one of his employees would come to work in shorts and bring his dog with him too – and they loved him for it.

For me, that heart-warming anecdote brought a distinct layer of authenticity to this beautifully presented and easily digestible book. I believe Brand Genetics really is a human-first business – and as such businesses of all sizes need to sit up and listen.

(I don’t suppose you’ve got a job going, have you?)

(Starting Up & Scaling Up A Human-First Business by Andrew Christophers is published by Troubador and costs £12.99)

This is not so much as a review, as 21 reasons why Jessica Hepburn should step onto the stage and take a bow.

Bow 1: Skilful narration

21 Miles is about Jessica’s endeavour to swim the Channel after 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, which she has written about in her previous book, The Pursuit of Motherhood. She gets a skilful narration point for telling the IVF backstory in a way that makes sense to those who don’t already know it but which isn’t repetitive to those who do.

Bow 2: Swimming

It’s an awesome thing that’s hard to describe. Jessica captures it both physically and metaphorically. “I can feel tears in my goggles but here in the pool, no one knows, not even the water, because water only knows tears as itself.”

Bow 3: Nature

It’s not just any old swimming but open water swimming that Jessica’s doing here. So the book is also about our relationship with nature. “Even though I feel small and vulnerable, as I start to swim I also feel something else. The words of a poem my dad used to recite to me when I was a child come unbidden into my mind: ‘And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more’.”

Bow 4: Humour

What can I say? This girl’s hilarious.

Bow 5: Food

As if it wasn’t enough to connect motherhood and swimming, Jessica makes this into a food story too. In so doing she integrates another of those themes that’s BIG for most women. Big love to Jessica for her fully-fledged fest of all things edible.

Bow 6: Skilful narration

She gets another skilful narration point for integrating such diverse themes into a coherent story.

Bow 7: Other women

Jessica invites women, ranging from scientist Baroness Greenfield (childless) to businesswoman Nicola Horlick (mother of six), to have lunch with her and answer the question of whether motherhood makes you happy. This is interesting, as it’s a question we don’t tend to ask. It’s also beautifully expansive as she finds a point of connection in each of the women’s baby stories and thereby binds them (us) together.

Bow 8: Reflections on motherhood

She might have missed the experience of motherhood but she had the meaning (to paraphrase TS Eliot). Through her quest she unveils insights that are fuller and deeper than those of many a literal mother.

Bow 9: Skilful narration

Jessica asks each of the women to give her one word to take with her on her swim and in so doing creates a poem. She deserves a skilful narration point for the very idea. When she has to dig deep in her swim, she recalls those words with each stroke. In so doing takes all the women she has interviewed with her and, by extension, all of womankind too. God bless you, Jessica.

Bow 10: Vulnerability

This vulnerability is all the more powerful because it’s shared before the wound has healed. “Sometimes I think the hardest thing about what I’ve been through – what we’ve been through – is that it makes it difficult to love because you’re so frightened of happiness being taken away.”

Bow 11: Living for the unborn children

A fellow swimmer, Nick, says swimming the Channel is all about the strength of the things deep inside you that are driving you forward. Jessica discovers her motivation. “Mille Gade swam the Channel for her children. I’m swimming it for me and Gertrude Ederle and the children we never had.” I find this both poignant and deeply inspiring.

Bow 12: Uterus-power

Jessica has her doubters, the greatest of which is Chris, who doesn’t think she stands a hope in Hell’s chance because she’s always complaining about the cold. But Jessica unveiled what the competitive sportsman couldn’t see – the gravitational pull of the womb.

Bow 13: Healing of family

It’s not part of the core narrative, but along the way Jessica grows in appreciation for her mum and dad and their own journeys into parenthood. It’s a beautiful reaching back as the stretches forward. After her swim, she goes for a picnic with her mum. “Because although neither of us quite had the family of our dreams, we do have the family of our reality and that will always be something to treasure.”

Bow 14: Control

There are plenty in our culture who make out we can control our destiny through a mix of positive thinking and grim determination. Swimming the Channel and making a baby give the lie to that. This book tells a more truthful story – about the dance between what we can control and what we can’t and is all the more inspiring for it.

Bow 15: Conclusion 1 – sadness

And so Jessica starts to reach her conclusions on her search for the meaning of motherhood. “Every single person in the world seems to have something that makes them terribly sad. And life is about making the best of your sad thing.”

Bow 16: Conclusion 2 – connection

“Connection is vital to human happiness and if you can’t get it ready-made by having your own children you need to create it in different ways.”

Bow 17: Conclusion 3 – something else

Jessica recognises that however much women want to have children, they need to have something else as well. I am sure this is true. There is, at the heart of motherhood, and ambivalence. We want our children, but we also want to get back to our “something else” – our work, our silence, our creativity, whatever it is. If we don’t have a something else, it will be very difficult to let our children go as they grow up. So the something else is at the heart of motherhood as well as the heart of life.

Bow 18: Skilful narration

Jessica manages to keep the story twisting to the end. In almost the last chapter, she reveals she had asked each woman what they would eat for their last supper. When she has finished her swim, she eats that food as a celebration. It’s a surprising detail, all the better for being held back and which celebrates the symbolic power of food as well as nicely concluding the theme.

Bow 19: Climax 3 – relationship

There are three endings to this story, each of which had me in tears. The final (surprising) climax is the last word – love – which Jessica’s partner, Peter, giver her retrospectively as her Channel word. This is a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship. (It’s also NOT a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship and Jessica gets a bonus skilful narration point for the way she manages to tell the story while empathically not telling that story in deference to Peter’s desire for privacy.)

Bow 20: Climax 2 – She did it!

She bloody well did it! Listen to that sound. It’s the sound of all my eggs rushing down my fallopian tubes to stand on the edge of my uterus cheering. Well done Jessica! Bloody, menstrual bloody, well done!

Bow 21: Climax 3 – mother

For me, the most profound part of the book was when Jessica’s mother gave her childless daughter the word “mother” to swim the Channel with. I could have cried her a Channel. I almost did.

I hope you’ve not got backache from all the bowing, Jessica. But you’ve swum the Channel, so you should be OK. What more can I say? Thank you.

At least we presume she has some kind of dementia.  Maud describes herself as “forgetful”.  She sometimes recognises her daughter, Helen, and sometimes doesn’t.  She gets into all kinds of muddles, despite the little notes she leaves herself to remember the important things.  She still wanders off. She still goes to a church but can’t remember her own name when somebody asks it. To have such an unreliable narrator as the protagonist in a whodunit is charming, compassionate and original.

Over the course of the novel Maud’s memory deteriorates in a way that many will recognise. Maud has a friend, Elizabeth, of a similar age.  Elizabeth is missing.  Maud is convinced of that.  She goes to Elizabeth’s house and Elizabeth is no longer there.  She keeps telling people Elizabeth is missing – Helen, the police, Elizabeth’s son – but no one takes her seriously.  Maud is determined to find her.

Novel about dementia

At one level this is a story of someone with dementia who has become fixated on something and keeps repeating it over and over again.  “Elizabeth is missing.”   Towards the end of the novel it becomes apparent that Elizabeth is in hospital and Maud has been told many times where she is and even taken to visit. We feel for Maud who can’t remember this and therefore can’t be assuaged in her anxiety. We feel for Helen in her attempt to stay patient and loving.

But this is not the only tale being told.  Maud’s short term memory is such that if she has a cup of tea she can’t remember to drink it. Her long term memory, however, is lucid.

Novel about missing sister

Seventy years ago, her older sister, Sukey, who was married to Frank and lived nearby went missing. Nobody knew what happened to her.  Her body was never found. Naturally, this was a traumatic experience for the young Maud and events in the old Maud’s life bring back the memories of what happened when the family heard Sukey had gone and set about trying to find her.

Old Maud’s distress that Elizabeth is missing echoes young Maud’s distress that Sukey is missing. A bottle of Macallan whisky by the kerb of the road in the present reminds Maud of a bottle of Macallan whisky being drunk by Frank, all those year ago.

Neat story telling

And so it is that the story of what happened seventy years ago is woven into the tale of what is happening in the present. The reader can guess that the cause of Elizabeth’s disappearance is entirely innocent even if we are not told, until the end, where she is.  The cause of Sukey’s disappearance is another matter.  Was she kidnapped? Did she commit suicide? Was she murdered? And if so, who did it? Was it the dodgy and sometimes violent Frank? Was it Douglas the lodger who evidently knows far more than he is letting on? Was it the terrifying mad woman who hangs about in hedges?

To tell the two tales in this way is a neat literary device, partly because it’s a credible depiction of the mind of someone with dementia – clear about the past and confused by the here and now – but also because it provides some page-turning suspense in the midst of the muddlesome present.

Boring and depressing

I’ll be honest – I found the start of the novel and subsequent narrations by the old Maud hard to read.  I found them boring and depressing.  I found them boring, for the same reason that being with someone with dementia can be boring if you aren’t prepared to enter into a different way of being to be alongside that person. And while I might be prepared to do that for someone I love, it might not be what I would choose to do for my leisure. It can be depressing too, raising all those difficult feelings. What happened to the person she once was?  Why can’t I console her? What if this happens to me?

The clever thing about placing the Sukey-is-missing-tale within the Elizabeth-is-missing-story is that it offers some respite from these feelings that many of us prefer to avoid. Around the middle of the novel, the Sukey story becomes a gripping whodunit that provides enough forward-momentum to more than off-set the lack of action in Maud’s present reality.

At the end the two stories dovetail and the loose ends are tidied up.  Details that appear first as mere fixations are woven into the grand denouement as their significance is explained. The novel is very well crafted, which explains why Elizabeth is Missing won the Costa First Novel Award 2014, why the TV rights have been sold and why it was the subject of a bidding war between nine publishers.

Sympathetically told

As well as the style of narration, I would applaud Emma Healey for the sympathy with which she depicts all her characters. By weaving the story of young Maud within the mind of old Maud, the reader is reminded of the rich, if confusing, world that someone with dementia might be living in. At the end of the novel, Maud, Helen, the long-suffering and sometimes irritable daughter, and even the person we suspect is responsible for Sukey’s disappearance, are all held in loving compassion.

The novel serves to remind us that “Maud” might well wander into our church. We will meet people with dementia at the corner shop, at the bus stop or in the public library if we haven’t already. I hope that through reading Elizabeth is Missing, we might imagine how to honour that person’s reality, even if that reality is different from our own.

• This review first appeared in Third Way magazine

The tale is set in the future. In the world that Michele Guinness creates, The Church of England admits women to the episcopacy in 2014 (I wish). Vicky Burnham-Woods becomes Bishop of Larchester in 2016 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 2020.

Vicky is charismatic, successful in growing churches and deeply committed to bringing the church back into the heart of the community. She is thoroughly committed to defending the poor and not afraid to fight the government on social justice and welfare reform.

Interestingly, the prime minister at the time of Vicky’s appointment is a gay man but Vicky, despite being radical as far a social justice is concerned, is conservative around marriage and not sympathetic to clergy wanting to conduct gay marriages. This wins her some enemies. She has enemies in other places too.

As the novel unfurls, it becomes clear that somebody is trying to undo her.   Press photographers have an uncanny knack of knowing exactly where she is, even in her most private moments. Tit bits of her past are leaked to the press in an attempt to undermine her.

Who is it that is doing this? Is it one of her friends? Is it a member of her staff? Are they working with the prime minister? Or with those bishops who were utterly opposed to her appointment on the grounds of her sex?

It’s a great story – or at least it should be.

The problem with Archbishop is that it isn’t the page-turner that it could have been. I confess to having found it grindingly slow – all 543 pages of it. It’s very well researched but it isn’t well enough written. The characterisation is poor, the dialogue unbelievable and the story-telling somewhat cumbersome.

Let’s start with the research. Guinness clearly knows and understands the Anglican church. The historical references are accurate, the way in which the media behaves is convincing and the window into the NHS (Vicky’s husband, Tom, is a surgeon) is well portrayed.

I would love to say the skulduggery she describes could never happen amongst a community of Christians – but alas I know better. There are many of us who are very familiar with that being nice to your face whist stabbing you in the back. Guinness gets the Church of England and portrays it very well.

Indeed, one of the features of the novel that hindered my enjoyment was the very accuracy with which the church was portrayed. It was so depressing. Who would want to spend their leisure time filling their head with the machinations of the Anglican church? Not me.

So full marks to Guinness on research. Few could have done it better.

Unimpressive characterisation

The characterisation is less impressive. It would be unfair to say that Vicky is a caricature – she is far more than that – but the way she is depicted is a little “thin” nonetheless. I would have hoped that an Archbishop of Canterbury would have had a richer and deeper inner life than Vicky appears to have. In the very last scene, Vicky and Tom whisper their marriage vows to each other before falling asleep. Vicky seems too twee, too emotionally immature, to have reached the highest ecclesiastical office. I never quite believed in her enough to care greatly about what happened.

Which brings me to the story-telling. The narrative is developed through back-story. The novel starts in 2019 with the Crown Nominations Commission discussing who to put forward for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury. From there, there is a flipping to and fro between what is happening in the present and the events of the past, helpfully indicated with subheadings: February 2020, 2006, 2020, 1983 and so on.

I didn’t find this confusing – but for those who do, there is a chronology in the form of Vicky’s CV at the back (don’t wait until you get to the end to find it) – but I did find it tedious. I reached the point where I just wanted to skip the back-story and wished Guinness had done the same.

Covering too many bases

I think Guinness is attempting to cover too many bases in this novel. There is nothing wrong with a slow story – nothing at all. If a novel has got beautifully portrayed characters that seem more real than your own flesh and blood, it doesn’t if they don’t get anywhere very fast.

Guinness starts many of the chapters with a quote from the German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, who is Vicky’s seminal theologian. A different kind of novel, would be one in which the theology of Moltmann is integrated into the tale, making it into a fiction that illuminates theology and vice versa. Again, if a novel like that was done sufficiently well, the speed at which the story unravels would not important.

But I don’t think Guinness is displaying the skills, in this text, to write a novel that can afford to be slow. She is probably a very good writer of non-fiction but a mediocre writer of novels. (It’s the weakness of the dialogue gives that brings me to that conclusion.) In which case, she needs to keep the reader interested by spinning a great yarn. And she could do that. The plot is great. If she had just made a decision to tell the story twice as fast, I might have enjoyed it.

• This review first appeared in Third Way magazine.

What should a mum do about swearing?

What is a mother to do? Do I tell my son it’s unacceptable to swear and forfeit pocket money whenever a foul word leaves his lips? Does that mean I have to clean up my own act? Do I want to do that? Could I? Do I tell him it’s sometimes acceptable for adults, but never for children? It’s OK in private, just not in public?

Cue Melissa Mohr and Holy Sh*t, a Brief History of Swearing… How I wish she had written it before.

This is an utterly delightful book. It’s beautifully written, witty and in many places laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also a serious book.  She looks her subject matter square­-in-the-face. Mercifully, she never resorts to being silly or coy, though she does acknowledge her own sensitivity to taboo and the words she herself finds hard to write down.

Swearing has a history

Mohr looks at the history of swearing, as in taking oaths (that’s the “holy” bit of the title) and at obscenities, those emotive words that tend to remind us we have bodies (that’s the “sh*t” bit).

She traces their stories, from Roman times, through to the Bible, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries right up until the present day, looking at how oaths and obscenities have evolved and how they are related to the culture of the day. It claims to be a brief history but it seems pretty thorough to me.

It’s worth reading for the chapter on the Bible alone. I learnt a great deal from that and not just about swearing. For example, Mohr asks the question – why does God swear? Every word God says is true, so why does he say to Abraham: “By myself I have sworn” in Genesis? And why does God command us to swear by him: “The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by him alone you shall swear.” (Deut 6:13)?

Mohr explains the role of swearing is related to the establishment of monotheism.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, God was one of hundreds of gods a person could worship and so he was in a quest to establish himself as the one true God.

Swearing is a key weapon in this campaign. When you swear by God, you acknowledge that he is omnipotent; he is the one that can see your actions, hear your words. If you swear by Baal, you acknowledge his omnipotence instead. That is why God asks his people to swear by him and why he swears himself to them, by way of example.

Taking oaths is a tool to establish monotheism

The taking of oaths, which is still part of our legal system and government today, is rooted in that tool to establish monotheism that goes right back to the days of Abraham.  How interesting.  (Well, that’s one way of putting my response. What I actually thought was “Blimey!”)

And while we’re talking fascinating anecdotes, listen to this.  Mohr takes us on a hilarious romp through the use of euphemism in the Hebrew Bible. She says it never refers to the genitals when hand, foot, side, heel, shame, leg or thigh will do.

Eve is made from Adam’s penis

She then quotes the scholar Ziony Zevit, who argues that, in the Genesis narrative, Eve is actually made out of Adam’s penis, in particular from his penis bone. Most mammals have a bone in their penis, a baculum, which helps with erections. Humans, spider monkeys, whales and horses don’t, but the other species can’t achieve erections through blood pressure alone and have a baculum to assist.

Zevit claims that the ancient Israelites would have known about anatomy, being familiar with skeletons, and would have known men and women have the same number of ribs.  Zevit thinks that in this story, the word “tesla” often translated as “rib” is actually a euphemism for genitals, as it so often was. What the story really means is that Eve was made from Adam’s penis. The baculum was taken from him and used to create his companion, thus in one neat myth you explain where women came from and why men don’t have penis bones.

Is swearing good or bad?

But enough of these tit-bits, I’m sure that what you really want to know is whether swearing is a good or a bad thing and how embarrassed we should be feeling when our children start saying: “Bugger.” (If indeed other people’s children do.)

Mohr does have a view, but she restricts her opinions on the rights and wrongs of using obscene language to the introduction and the epilogue. I am grateful to her for that. I am also grateful to her because through reading her entertaining history, I found myself developing my own thinking , so now I feel confident and robust in what I am passing on to my child.

When my boy was aged six, he came to me and said: “Mum. I really want to swear. Can I? Will you be cross with me?” I said: “That depends. Is it one of those occasions when only a swear word will do?”

“Yes,” he said.

“In that case,” I replied.  “Swear quietly and make sure you don’t repeat it outside this house.”  He came over and whispered in my ear: “F***ing Mrs Stapleton!”

And he was absolutely right.

• A version of this review  appeared in Third Way.

It seems Anglicans and Catholics have spent the summer speaking about gay marriage while millions, on the underground, in book clubs and online have been discussing Anastasia Steele and her relationship with the sadomasochist Christian Grey.

Can they get together despite their incompatible sexualities?

The central issue of the easy-read book which has topped the UK best-sellers list for the past six months, is of a 22-year-old virgin who falls in love with a multi-billionaire who wants to tie her up and spank her and make her ask for more. Anastasia is looking for romance. Christian can‘t get turned on when sex is vanilla.  Can they find a way of getting it together despite their seemingly incompatible sexualities?

It’s an interesting question and one that raises questions for us all about compromise within sex, going outside our comfort zones, working out what we really don’t like and what we could develop a taste for.

Confusing sadomasochism with domestic violence

Last month the discussion took a darker turn.  Clare Phillipson, director of Wearside Women in Need, a charity for victims of domestic violence, called for women to burn their copies on 5 November along with an effigy of Christian Grey, on the grounds that it is “an instruction manual for an abusive individual to sexually torture a vulnerable young woman.”

Phillipson claims the story is about a domestic violence perpetrator who takes someone who is less experienced and powerful, spins her a yarn, starts doing horrific sexual things to her and makes it seem normal.  She worries that teenagers will be picking the book up and thinking: “This is alright.”

The church needs a foothold in Fifty Shades debates

I think it’s important for the church to get a foothold in the discussion at this point, but it’s difficult for it to do so because historically its understanding of sexual ethics has been focussed on procreative acts – heterosexual vaginal intercourse in the context of marriage and so on. This way of thinking has nothing to offer when exploring Fifty Shades of Grey-type dilemmas.

The first thing that I would say to Phillipson is that I can understand why women who have been beaten by their partners are highly-sensitised to beatings in erotic fantasies. I have sympathy with those who are reminded, through reading Fifty Shades of Grey, of being stalked and abused and traumatised.

But I would also say that it is very important to draw a distinction between a scenario in which a woman consents to being spanked because it turns her on and in which there is an agreed safe word for her say when she wants it to stop, and one in which a chap simply beats the Hell out of her.

Christian Grey is a role-model

I think Christian Grey goes far further than your average bloke in ensuring that Anastasia really is consenting to what they do in sex. On that count, he is a role-model.

Having said that, I agree that “consent” is slippery. There is an argument that women have been socialised to be submissive to men and that the submissive/dominant dynamic has been eroticised. A woman’s desire to be submissive could be seen as evidence of her oppression rather than her liberation, even if she does consent to it.

I agree with that. Besides, we all know we can “consent” to things because we’re vulnerable, because our options are limited, because we think everybody else is doing it, because we feel we want something but when we actually do it we realise that we don’t.

Consent is tricksy

Consent is dynamic, it’s tricksy and it can take considerable skill and experience to discern when it is deep and authentic and when it is half-baked and mistaken.

This is where the church has a great deal to offer. It has a very handy tool up its sleeve for assessing the quality of consent – the teachings of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order.

Ignatius’ discernment can be used in sex

Ignatius taught about consolation and desolation. When we are consoled, he said, new energy is released and we feel closer to others. When we are desolate, we turn in on ourselves and feel drained. With practice we can evaluate our experiences according to how desolate or consoled they made us and we can choose to live more in consolation.

I think this practice is invaluable in discerning whether our sexual experiences are truly what we want or whether we are being manipulated and compromising where we shouldn’t be. If Anastasia came to me for help in her dilemma with Christian, I would offer her St Ignatius.  “When you are playing with Christian, listen very carefully to your feelings, both as it’s happening and afterwards.  How is it making you feel?  Is it making you feel peaceful and fully alive? Is it making you withdraw and contract inside?”

In all my readings of sex manuals and feminist literature, I have found nothing as useful as this tool for improving sex.  The church has so much to offer in making better lovers of us all. Come on. Let’s give it.

• This article was first published in The Church Times, 14 September 2012