I'm just back from four days away with friends down in Cumbria.  I have been going to these long residential Spring weekends on the edge of the Lake District for well over twenty years and have written a lot about them too ... see for example the sequence of posts from a couple of years' ago beginning "Peer groups, Cumbria spring group: first morning - arriving".

It’s about six in the morning.  A cuckoo is calling repeatedly and I’ve just woken.  I’m warm in my sleeping bag, but it’s quite cold in the tent.  How am I feeling?  Frightened!  Externally I’m fine, but when I look inside there’s a constriction.  When I explore it more awarely I get an image of a cold, heavy snake lying down the length of my body and most obviously there’s a constriction around my heart.

"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”    Rainer Maria Rilke "Letters to a young poet".

I wrote a blog post in the autumn - "Improving therapeutic success rates: UK IAPT data gives us a clearer set of targets" - highlighting that, if we want to improve how effective we are at an activity, it's likely to be crucially important that we monitor how well we're actually doing and whether or not our outcomes are getting better.