This project has been sitting with me for quite a while — about 15 years, in fact. I’ve tried again and again to move it forward, but always hit the same wall: I knew what I wanted to share, but couldn’t quite get my thoughts down in a clear, flowing way.
Now, with the help of AI tools, that barrier has lifted. They act a bit like my writing companions — on hand 24/7 to help me shape, and polish my ideas. Thanks to them, I’m finally able to bring this project to life (as of September 2025).
What’s It All About?
None of it is rocket science. No single post is going to be life changing. Much of the value of this, I hope, is having an growing resource on hand when you, or the people around you, need it, to make small incremental improvements that can feel like little victories. (See the “marginal gains” post link below)
The blog is built around challenges, strategies, and scenarios, with full stories emerging where they naturally fit together.
– When a challenge and a strategy are tightly linked, I’ll tell the whole story.
– When a strategy applies across different challenges, I’ll keep it separate and link posts together so you can explore connections in your own way.
Think of it less like a conventional straight line chronological blog, and more like a web of experiences and ideas, all linked for you to wander through.
My experience is that I’m 17 years into my health journey, and still finding new ways to do things using that fraction (half ?) of my brainpower I am left with. If this resource existed before, I could perhaps have been spending more of my one life in other ways, including getting back to and managing a working life..
As of right now, I’m building working descriptions of well over 100 challenges, a similar number of strategies, a score or more insights, and a handful of full stories. Only a few are polished enough to share as yet — but the collection is growing daily, I have bucket loads of snippets to factor into future posts .
A Little About Me
My background of relevance is an unusual mix of the technical and the personal. Back in the 1980s I was lead developer for a radiotherapy planning tool, as part of a large European research project. My part in that was aimed particularly at irradiating brain tumours. That was before I had the misfortune to get my own! In 2024 I had a stroke, from which I am recovering slowly but surely, but it has left me most significantly with mobility issues.
I’ve been a scout leader for more than 25 years, bringing me into contact with a huge range of abilities of the young people in my care, many with their own developmental challenges. Now, living with my own set of challenges, I find I’ve been given another perspective: the lived experience of managing life with different limitations,
Living With Two Brains
Sometimes I joke that I’m “the man with two brains.”
– The first brain was the quick-learning one I had before illness.
– The second brain is the one I live with now — still rich in memories and skills, but slower to take in new information, and less able to store it.
This project is, in many ways, my attempt to make sense of life with “brain number two” — and to share the insights and strategies that help me along the way.
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