Thinking At Half Speed

Tag: cognitive decline

  • Why an Hour of Conversation Can Leave Me Unable to Think

    There is a moment I know well. I am mid-conversation — talking, listening, engaged — and then, with very little warning, everything stops working at once. Not just the words. The movement. The thinking. All of it collapses into what I can only describe as a super slow heap. It is not tiredness in any…

  • Wrestling with WordPress

    The honest account of what makes WordPress tricky for novices — setup order, navigation, templates, phone limitations — and what the mobile app can do once the hard work is done. Includes alternatives.

  • Your starter prompt to build a blog with Claude

    A copy-and-paste prompt to start building a blog with Claude, plus five things to decide before you begin and what you need set up beforehand. Built from real experience.

  • What Claude can and cannot do for your blog

    An honest account of what Claude can do directly for your blog — writing, publishing, creating pages, setting up categories — and what still needs you to do it yourself.

  • Glossary — plain English guide to the terms used in this blog

    Plain English definitions of the technical words and phrases used in this blog — AI, Claude, Craft, WordPress, categories, tags, and more. A reference guide for anyone new to these tools.

  • Words Without Meaning

    I came downstairs this afternoon. My partner was talking to me. I couldn’t understand a word. Not the sentences, not the context — just the occasional word floating through, disconnected from everything around it. She was talking and I was watching, and none of it was arriving. There was frustration on both sides. Talking to…

  • The Scoot

    I hadn’t been out for a couple of weeks. My own fault, but the sun was shining so we went — me on the scooter, my partner alongside. It was properly spring. Blue skies, birds singing, a water vole in the stream, squirrels everywhere, and the trees all out in their pinks and whites. Joyous.…

  • The Two Tool Strategy — What I Use and Why

    April 2026 One of the first things I learned when I started losing cognitive capacity is that complexity is the enemy. Every additional app, every new interface, every extra subscription is another thing to remember, another thing to manage, another drain on the limited reserves I’m trying to protect. So I made a deliberate decision…

  • How to build your own AI tools plan

    April 2026 The previous post described my own two tool setup – Claude for thinking, Siri for hands-free control. But your situation may be different to mine, and what works for me may not be the right answer for you. This post is a practical guide to working out what your own setup should look…

  • What’s the difference between writing with AI and a celebrity ghostwriter?

    April 2026 When a celebrity publishes a memoir, the chances are someone else wrote most of it. A ghostwriter sat with them, listened to their stories, found their voice, and produced the manuscript. The named author read it, approved it, and put their name on the cover. Nobody seriously calls that inauthentic. The experiences were…

  • How to keep it authentically your voice when writing with AI

    15 April 2026 The concern It is a fair one. AI-generated writing has a recognisable texture – smooth, competent, and somehow belonging to nobody. If you have read much of it you know it immediately. The worry is that using AI to help write means your voice gets smoothed away along with the effort. That…