Quick diagnosis and treatment of strokes saves lives.

Remember "STR..." and look for

S   Ask the person to SMILE .
T   TALK. Ask them to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE coherently (such as "It is sunny today").
R   Ask them to RAISE BOTH ARMS .

If any trouble with these, call an ambulance.

Fuller details here. Memorise them and pass them on!

This week the progress in setting up the new firm has felt good. It is three months since Richard Hovey and Associates Ltd was incorporated (on 18th October 2007) and it feels as if momentum is building. I am pleased to be spending more time with clients, and also to have competed some negotiations with suppliers that I started before Christmas.

I have been looking for a competitive and helpful supplier of Public Liability and Professional Indemnity Insurance, and I have found that through Towergate Professional Risks (they are brokers; my policy is underwritten by Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance plc). Members of some professional institutions can benefit from corporate agreements.

I have been looking for a local accountant that I feel that I get on with, who understands what I am up to, and looks like giving a good service including forward-looking advice. It has been imporant to me that the firm is switched on about taxation, so a firm that comprises both Chartered Accountants and Chartered Tax Advisers is likely to be a good choice. I have decided to work with Chippenham firm Carter Dutton.

Browsing through the latest newsletter from Ekklesia I came across a "so true" article by Gene Stoltzfus about making the anger in us a force for good. He draws his conclusions from his work with Christian Peacemaker Teams. Read the article in his blog (or republished by Ekklesia).

To add thoughts from Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist's Way, as she speaks of how to think when we find that we are angry: "Anger is fuel... anger is meant to be listened to... anger is a map. I like the idea that, if we don't let it overcome us or turn into hatred (as Gene puts it), it helps to show us the way forward.

I am excited that my investment in SIMA^TM Who do you think you are? training is bearing fruit, and a good addition to my coaching work.

So, the new business is building (praise God!) and this week I have also met with the Wilsher Group again to look at ways forward of collaboration, with particular interest in their coaching work and use of the Insights Discovery Personal Profile which is based on Jungian typology.

One of the highlights of my time with CMS was a one-month visit to India and Sri Lanka, in January 2006. One thing that I hope to have time to do soon is to make the photos and my journal accessible on the web.

Christian encounters Christianity - in one of its most ancient forms amongst the Copts of Egypt. In this third episode (televised yesterday) Peter spends three weeks in a cave in the desert, following the example of the Desert Fathers. They were the first ever monks: living in isolated communities they gained a reputation of closeness to God and great practical wisdom.

Whereas his guides in the previous two episodes had seemed to be encouraging him towards (personal) enlightenment, I felt that here he was introduced to a greater cosmic purpose: that his solitude and prayer might not only affect him but the wider world. Effectiveness in prayer in this sense is about persevering by fighting the demons that become apparent (at the least in the mind).

Having struggled with the silence and solitude, by the middle of his third week he was starting to enjoy it, and - with a face that had started to show joy - he looked forward to "another beautiful day; another difficult day." Life is difficult, if we engage with it.

At the end of his stay he reflected that the battle is about making good choices. (In my mind this connects with the importance of Discernment.) He said that not to join this battle (of concern about truth and what is right) is to be numb. He admitted that when he arrived he had been numb, but that he was now waking up. This felt painful, he said, like being born.

This is a challenge to us all to develop our "inner life," and to seek appropriate help to do so, and to deal with what we find there.

Before he went up the mountain he spent time in the monastery, commenting that the Orthodox form of worship had many differences as well as similarities to that which he was familiar with. In an aside he noted that the practice of prostration when praying was an ancient Christian practice before the Muslims took it on.

4 THINGS YOU PROBABLY NEVER KNEW YOUR MOBILE PHONE COULD DO

There are a few things that can be done in times of grave emergencies. Your mobile phone can actually be a life saver or an emergency tool for survival. Check out the things that you can do with it:

FIRST Emergency

The Emergency Number worldwide for Mobile is 112. If you find yourself out of the coverage area of your mobile; network and there is an emergency, dial 112 and the mobile will search any existing network to establish the emergency number for you, and interestingly this number 112 can be dialled even if the keypad is locked. Try it out.

SECOND Have you locked your keys in the car?

Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their mobile phone from your cell phone.

Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other 'remote' for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the boot). Editor's Note: It works fine! We tried it out and it unlocked our car over a mobile phone!'

THIRD Hidden Battery Power

Imagine your mobile battery is very low. To activate, press the keys *3370# Your mobile will restart with this reserve and the instrument will show a 50% increase in battery. This reserve will get charged when you charge your mobile next time.

FOURTH How to disable a STOLEN mobile phone?

To check your Mobile phone's serial number, key in the following digits on your phone: * # 0 6 #

A 15 digit code will appear on the screen. This number is unique to your handset. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. When your phone get stolen, you can phone your service provider and give them this code. They will then be able to block your handset so even if the thief changes the SIM card, your phone will be totally useless. You probably won't get your phone back,but at least you know that whoever stole it can't use/sell it either. If everybody does this, there would be no point in peoplestealing mobile phones.

The information above is as received in an e-mail - I have not checked it.

On Friday Peter Owen-Jones' fascinating adventures on television continued as he attended the only-every-six-years Hindu Mela (gathering) on the banks of the River Ganges in India, met a guru, and experienced the initiation of lots of Saddhu (holy men).

His last Kung Fu exploit looked pretty hard work, but in this he seemed to look bewildered and out of his depth most of the time. This may have been helped by the hash smoking which seemed to be a necessary part of being a Saddhu, or the very in-your-face experience of lots of naked men covered in ash excitedly converging on the river at dawn to immerse themselves as an initiation. Peter opted out of this part "so as not to offend." On a brighter note, he may not have needed the initiation because as a Church of England Priest the Guru and his followers seemed keen to accept him as a Saddhu.

More insightful was his trip into the Himalayas, dressed in the saffron robes of a Saddhu, to experience solitude in a particular small cave (regularly used for the purpose) in a remote village. He enjoyed the companionship on the way. Unfortunately, after being accepted and fed by the villagers for some weeks, he had to abandon his trek further into the Himalayas because of dysentery.

I found it fascinating that although he didn't really know what being a Saddhu was all about, the villagers accepted him in the role. This may have been helped by some long-awaited rain that fell as he arrived. His cave was empty when he arrived, but gradually the villagers brought him everything he needed from cow dung to bedding to food and water: humbling hospitality.

In reflecting on his own religion, and life as a parish priest in England, he felt that the life of the guru, with casual visits by many people, was perhaps more like the life of Jesus than he had experienced, and how the pattern of being a holy man is perhaps how his predecessors would have experienced their own ministry a few years ago. (This is in contrast to the more managerial way in which many church leaders feel it is right to focus their energies.)

He noted the way in which the Saddhu is "sustained by the faith of the community." In the U.K I note that the church authorities sometimes wonder about how to make the church more relevant, or can blame themselves for lack of impact. This reciprocity in the life of a Saddhu means that one also has to ask whether British society collectively wants holy men (or women) or a church.

I can't wait for the final episode next Friday. Here's the link to the BBC site, you can watch the ones you missed!

This week I have started to get to grips with contact details of people on my p.c. (first of all I had to restore my PDA which crashed before Christmas because I allowed the batteries to run down) and started to e-mail people to meet abut Finding True North. I'm glad I've made myself get started on this rather than just doing admin!

Last night I was a guest at the final session of the Wilsher Group's coach training course (CLACC) and found myself unexpectedly on the receiving end of some free coaching from someone who was completing the course. This was really helpful as I used it to think through my USP (Unique Selling Point). I find this fairly straightforward to do for clients, but difficult to do on myself. An amusing and helpful question from my coach was, "What exactly is the Richard Hovey experience?"

After the Christmas and New Year holiday I'm back to setting up Finding True North. A focus for the New Year needs to be "doing the business" with clients but there are some adminstration jobs to finish off.

Today I contracted for office facilities at Hartham Park, a short drive from my home.

I have also been impressed by the speed of HSBC in sending me cheque books and bits of plastic after I chose to open a bank account with them. Either they are really speedy, or banks work faster for businesses than they do for personal customers. As well as a local branch and helpful staff they have a good charging structure. (Included in this is two year's free banking in their January "sale.")

Does God appear when you want Him to or, to put it another way, how do you authentically celebrate the Epiphany?

In our local churches we celebrated the feast of the Epiphany today (6th January). This festival celebrates the appearance of God, or his "shining forth," or his glory. In the western church the event usually associated is the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus bringing gifts.

On this Sunday so soon after Christmas it often seems to be a challenge for those constructing worship and choosing hymns to know whether to retain the feel of Christmas or to try to do something different. Most of the hymns seemed to conjure up an image of trudging slowly through snow, and the sermon sought to encourage us to set New Year's Resolutions to do with being more environmentally responsible (too late, I'd done mine, but I do hope that they are responsible). So the set of compromises used this time round didn't seem to lift me to a sense of the presence of God's glory... until we got to the middle of the service.

At the customary handshake called "The Peace" everybody seemed to come alive and it struck me that (as well as everything else it means) the image of the baby Jesus speaks of the presence of the glory of God in each one of us - people - how special we are!

Sometimes I think I know too much about life as a vicar in the Church of England, so I was suprised to find myself watching a short documentarty about one on television last night.

Peter Owen Jones used to be in advertising, so I think he enjoys being in front of a camera. He says we've lost the plot about "spiritual enlightenment" in Britain, and that the church is too intellectual. So the one hour programmes follow him as he chooses three wildly different religious experiences. Last night was a Buddhist mountain monastery in China, from which Zen Buddhism later developed, and where the religious way - meditation - is a very physical martial art like Kung Fu. Apart from scenes of this guy of about my own age nearly killing himself by learning Kung Fu alongside seventeen year old youths, I liked the footage of him with other monks sweeping a terrace in a way that was really a dance.

I can feel that British Christians who want a more contemplative or less intellectual way of faith should first explore the rich depths of our local Christian heritage. I'm thinking for example of Celtic traditions, Lectio Divina, and the ways of St Ignatius (all of which crop up in the Spiritual Direction course that I am doing).

However I found this programme enriching. I liked the reminder that all life, including physical activity, should be worshipful. I liked the enlightenment that he seemed to discover as he found a sense of belonging with the monks, recognised that his worries were inside himself, and discovered that he was able to be more in tune with creation around him.

Anthony de Mello (yes I know I'm a fan of his) seems to have a similar perspective when he writes that happiness is something you have to discover inside yourself, rather than expect to come from external circumstances.

To continue this journey, watch the remaining two parts on BBC2 tv on Fridays at 9:00 p.m.

Richard Hovey and Associates Ltd now has another associate, as Finding True North links up with PRW Communications - an impressive firm who specialise in PR and design work for business to business markets.

This has come about from some impressive footwork by long-term friend Robin Weekes, after he received our Christmas Newsletter.

I find myself starting to think about resolutions for the year ahead. Sometimes I come up with long lists of things I want to achieve.

This year what comes to mind is a desire to have fun and listen.

Last year seemed to have a lot of downs as well as ups, and as a family we could do with building on the "fun." Work should be fun too, so this is in part about developing the new business.

Listening is about getting to know and being responsive to people, but it is also about listening to God - every day should be attentive. The best image I have of a close relationship with God is that of a pair of dancers who need to be very attentive to one another's every move including the footwork! (The image here is of dancing from the days when people used to hold one another - so "Strictly Come Dancing" style not disco - I must be showing my age.)

From a Christian point of view, there's something here about knowing, and living out, the "joy of our salvation."