Well having survived a night in the hotel room with a 7 year old who just couldn’t sleep, and an 11 year old that could sleep, but snored loudly, the morning ‘wake up’ call came as a delightful break from the 'night from hell’! The day at the University of Paris was also a delightful change even though I struggled to stay awake most of the day. Espresso help needed!

As is often the case it seems the speaker session titles promise more than the content actually delivers, which itself demonstrates to me, if I’m honest, the huge gulf in academic ‘speak’ and ‘real’ person on the street discussion. We [academics] seem to forget that we have a language or discourse that most people fail to understand, which even at times other academics struggle with. I know this may sound odd coming from an academic, but having spent the last three years talking to ‘non-believers’ - the frontline workers, who deliver the service - the last thing they want is academics debating why policy shapes practice in micro-elements of human systems, they want to know how, why and when does it start? Having sat through hours of computer based modelling demonstrations, with claims of scientific validity, we need to get real people actually engaged in the field, not bored by discussions on the micro-political power struggles of Marxist complexity thinking in a post-modernist economy via the latest software…… see I was listening! It seems that even in Complexity ‘ego’s’ get in the way of development.