If only I’d been any good at maths, I might have been a scientist.

But I wasn’t, and I’m not.

So when the world of popular science opened up a few years ago, I devoured what was being written by a range of very patient authors who gave more than a nod to people like me. Astronomy, mathematics, quantum mechanics? It was a whole new world.

Who’d have thought (certainly not my Physics teacher) that I’d one day, out of choice, be reading Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem (try it – it’s a page-turner, I promise), Philip Ball’s The Ingredients (my, this is an exquisite book) or the magnificence that is Stephen Hawking?

And let me not pretend that I understood every word. In trying to make sense of A Brief History of Time, I’ve read it and read it and read it again – all in the hope that each time I can reasonably digest a little bit more of it. Yes, I know what the quote on a card in the good Professor’s office means.

But what also unlocked a small part of the world of science to me were some fabulous books written for children – the Uncle Albert series. Their author, Russell Stannard, just happens to be a particle physicist with an amazing talent to be able to explain the theory of relativity to young people. Oh, and to me. I’m not ashamed to say that Uncle Albert is one of my favourite reads.

And in going back to basics, to finding something that appeals to the part of my brain that still needs some serious development, I rely on another wonderful tome – the Ladybird Book of Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation. I’m not sure the version I have of it is still in print . . . but it’s a well-thumbed work that I’ve shared with many people, because rules around language don’t change that much over time, do they? (Ok, apart from the odd bit of common usage which I’m happy to accept . . . though please be warned against trying to convince me that misuse of the word “sat” will ever be acceptable).

So I’m good with the idea of going back to basics.

But it makes me wonder . . . how many times do we apply that philosophy to other areas of our lives?

• You might be really good at asking people you work with for feedback about you (and please keep doing that!), but how often do you take a moment to find out how well your relationships in other aspects of your life are going? Perhaps with the person closest to you, maybe with a good friend?

• Have you ever checked the provenance of some of the messages you regularly give out? I did this only recently when I was curious enough to want to know more about The Comfort Zone model, and found that Karl Ronke didn’t create it (Mr Ronke told me). And many years ago, I researched a model about communication that was so often rolled out in my organisation, yet didn’t sit comfortably with me – and, I was right, Professor Mehrabian’s wildly misquoted statistics on the importance that can be applied to words as a percentage of other types of communication, were not what they at first seemed. (Actually, it didn’t take much for me to suspect that if I wanted you to explain how to do something on the computer, I shouldn’t be expecting you to do it through the medium of dance – yes, words are important!)

• And if you sometimes get it wrong in an interaction at work, does it hurt for you to sit down in a period of quiet reflection, to maybe come to the brave conclusion that you did get it wrong, and then to plan how to provide an apology that’s meaningful and heartfelt?

Going back to basics can be so liberating.

Returning to a moment where you remind yourself of how well you used to do it, might help you to recover an attitude or behaviour that once made you most successful, and made others feel good.