If you spend your day in the pending tray, waiting for things to happen, then you'll probably spend your life waiting for things to happen.

(Clue: how often do you surf news sites and log into Twitter?)

There are so many things to be watching and waiting for:...

'We're all in it together' is, on the surface, an excellent message behind which to unite a country. It alludes to wartime life and suggests that we're all feeling the same pain.

Of course, we're not and it doesn't appear to be working. Increasingly, it's being used as a...

Scottish people living outside Scotland should have a vote on whether the country should be independent from the rest of the UK.

Over 800,000 people, like me, are Scottish but since we live outside Scotland we are to be excluded from having a voice on this historic issue.

Attention is probably the rarest commodity in the west - possibly even the world. It's hard to get, hard to hold on to and really hard to do anything with. The bad news is that it's disappearing fast. Attention is an endangered commodity.

The best advertisers have always known...

Everyone reading this has at some point done something wrong for which they should have apologised.

Sometimes, we will have done so. At other times, we will have moved on leaving injured people behind us, hoping they'll forget or that it won't really matter.

We should always apologise...

This statistic will disturb you: according to MORI just over half of us believe that a man or woman in the street will tell us the truth where as only 14% believe that politicians will do the same.

And yet we do not entrust our future, the reform of...

Do journalists have a responsibility for our feelings?

In recent weeks Radio Four's flagship programme, Today, has been criticised for its negative coverage of the security challenges with the London Olympics.

Listeners are fed up, it would appear, with the Olympics being talked down. Today, no doubt, would counter...

Mr Cameron is in the doghouse again.

Predictably, the prime minster is taking flak over his decision to run parenting classes for people. As expected, some are calling the initiative an example of the 'nanny state'. In due course, editors will pull out examples of poor parenting by members...

Research on how people make judgements suggests that we all too often rely upon skewed models of how the world works and perverse common sense. In making sense of the world, we are vulnerable creatures, easily swayed by rhetoric and slogans. For more on this see Daniel Kahneman....

It must be very frustrating to spend months working on The Budget only to find that the whole thing is reduced to a few choice words: granny tax and pasty-gate.

All that work and it comes to nought. Or worse, it becomes a major source of embarrassment when the...

The UK faces challenges of such enormity that we urgently need to reconnect with, and put all our trust in, the political class.

But such a leap of faith may require a complete re-launch of the political brand. Just one in 10 people trust politicians to tell the truth....

Just one in ten people believe that politicians will tell them the truth according to MORI research.
The same figures show that more than half believe that the man or woman in the street will do the same.

And it's not just politicians that fail the...

You could easily spend 400 hours each year just catching up with the news. If you add it all together - reading the Huffington Post, visiting the BBC website, watching news on TV, listening in the car and reading a daily paper as well as a Sunday title - nearly...

The NHS reforms probably represent the biggest change to this service in a generation. But few people seem to be talking about what's really wrong with it and whether the current reforms will make it better.

If the NHS was a patient, it would be as if it went,...

The demand for juicy gossip is what makes our media what it is.

Tales of people who have done well for themselves as well as the low-down on those who were never likely to do that well, fill page after page (and hour upon hour of reality TV).

Recent reports that disabled people are being harassed because of perceptions that they are benefit cheats are worrying.

It shows that people are not only able to rush to judgement but are prepared to act on their conclusions. Abusing people in the street is not far from...

In recent weeks, our national identity has once again been pushed up the news agenda. The timing of a Scottish referendum has begun to cause people south of the border to consider what it means to be English.

The Scots, it would appear, are clear about who they are,...

New Year is the season for new commitments and new failures to see our commitments through.

We begin well and mid-way through January we seek out those who abandoned their resolve early and use them as an excuse to do the same.

It's too easy not to do...

If you were a master propagandist, and you wanted to depress an entire nation and coax people from mild optimism into a full-blown depression, what would you do?

Some things you might be tempted to try:

• Talk up business failure
• Make every news report about how many businesses...

When John Lennon said that life was what happened when you were busy making other plans, he was being wildly optimistic. Life, all too often, seems to be governed by the day-to-day texture of niggles, anxieties and minor worries.

At the weekend, for example, my main concern wasn't whether...