There’s a Leonard Cohen track called The Stranger Song, and one of my favorite lines of it goes: ‘Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild he'll never need to deal another.’

Every so often I marvel at the fact that my occupation is itself a spiritual activity because it rests so entirely upon a daily act of faith. Our mortgage, my children’s education and upkeep, our entire lives depend upon on the quiet certainty that if I sit long enough in front of a blank computer screen, at some point it will get filled with sentences that people will pay good money to read.

Something fundamental is shifting in the zeitgeist of the corporate world. Not long ago, I got contacted by a British management consultant who, inspired by a presentation I gave about The Bond, proposed that we work together to bring the Bond into corporations. 

My heart sank when actress Angelina Jolie announced her decision last week to have a double mastectomy as a pre-emptive strike against what doctors told her was a whopping 87 per cent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 per cent chance of developing ovarian cancer because of the a mutation in her BRCA1 DNA-repairing gene on top of a family history of breast and ovarian cancer.

Last January after sustaining an injury to one knee during a particularly heated hockey match, our 16-year-old daughter Anya, a sports scholar, was handed the diagnosis most dreaded by athletes of any age: complete rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament of the knee. The ACL, one of the crisscross ligaments attaching the knee cap to leg bones, is pivotal to any movement of the knee, and a complete tear such as Anya sustained can spell a death sentence for any future sports.

Is anyone else out there staggered by the revelations that emerged from the recent Citizen Committee on Disclosure hearings, but even more staggered by the fact that the conventional press, in the main, are ignoring or belittling what has to be one of the biggest stories of all time?

 

We have another outbreak of measles over here in the British Isles, this time in Wales, and this time the press is backpedalling furiously to distance itself from its own headlines of a decade ago warning parents that measles-mumps-rubella (MMR ) triple shot may cause autism.

Even Jeremy Paxman, the acerbic, takes-no-prisoners host of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight, has silenced any voices of dissent. On two programs, he featured a panel entirely composed of pro-vaccine ‘experts’ and spent most of the time ranting about why we ought to have compulsory vaccination.

This week my family had some joyous news when our eldest daughter Caitlin got engaged to a lovely guy. Amid the celebrations, I paused to reflect on the journey of this extraordinary young woman, who appears to have all her ducks in a row at just 23.

It was not always this way. I watched in fascination as Caitlin transformed from a shy and tentative 16-year-old teenager who had trouble fitting into various schools to a confident young woman, completely in charge of her life and her future.

I've observed time and time again as she aimed high – almost too high – but got exactly what she'd hoped for. Against all odds (and predicted grades) she managed to gain entry to one of the top secondary schools and then one of the UK's top universities.

Last week, as you know, Baroness Margaret Thatcher died, and here in the UK, where I live, there’s been mourning and partying in equal measure.

What there hasn’t been so much of is reflection on why Thatcher was such a bully, even to her closest allies — a trait that ultimately led to her downfall — and also what it might mean to be effective female leader today, just two-plus decades later.

I bring this up because I had the opportunity to attend a launch of Jane Noble Knight’s book The Inspiring Journeys of Women Entrepreneurs, hosted by Gina Lazenby, who invited a group of mostly female entrepreneurs to meet, eat and chat about exactly what feminine leadership looks like in 2013.

My maternal grandmother Stella, who migrated to the US from Italy at the age of 15, had both her babies at home. This was not because she advocated home birth so much as because she had been taught to regard medical progress with a fair degree of suspicion. ‘Don’t go to hospital; they change your baby!’ her own mother had admonished her in broken English.