To Sheffield for an editorial meeting at Lena Dominelli’s house, for (we call it) ‘The Trilogy’ of books that Robert Adams, she and I edit for Palgrave Macmillan and is next year to come out in a new edition. For the first time all the books are being reedited simultaneously, and we are redoing them so that they are internally consistent. This has meant recommissioning about forty chapters.

But this meeting is about the chapters we write jointly; Lena and I expatiate and Robert takes notes to turn them into first drafts. Among the topics is how we deal with reflective practice, which was virtually new as a topic when we did the first edition back in 1997, but is now part of everyone’s best practice, both in social work and in other related professions.

A recent nursing student I talked to was doing ‘reflective practices’ for her course assignments. So much so, I say, and will write in my chapter on it, that it has become part of established practice, without anyone being really clear how you’re supposed to reflect. Added confusion in social work comes from ‘reflexive thinking’, imported from research methods by particularly feminist enthusiasm for putting yourself in the place of the person you’re doing the research about.