The day started with a visit to Balat, an older quarter of the city on the Golden Horn, where we were ushered into the Ahrida synagogue. Then, later in the day, we visited a fascinating carpet shop, Punto, where the proprietor introduced the spectrum of Turkish carpets - and one of his assistants demonstrated how to make a carpet fly, but sending it spinning like a frisbee. We also visited Yildiz palace, with its museum and theatre, before returning to the Seres Hotel for a lecture by one of our two tour leaders, Peter Clark, on 'Belle Epoque Istanbul'.... more >

Tuesday
Trains, Trams and White Russians

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Topkapi

Didn't see the Executioner's Fountain, but there were many places in Topkapi Palace this afternoon and evening where you got a profoundly uneasy sense of stress, politicking and human tragedies that played out during the 470-year rule of the Ottoman sultans. I found the Harem particularly suffocating in that sense, but the treasures - architectural or in the form of manuscripts, ceramics and stained glass, tiling, fountains, inlays, jewels, weapons and clocks - were sometimes quite literally breath-taking. It being a public holiday, the place was buzzing, but Elaine and I found we could escape the worst of the press by walking around counter-clockwise.... more >

Candle for Pat
And a lapcat

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East, West ...
... and a gull for breakfast

The Seres Hotel is fine, as far as it goes, but the views across the Golden Horn and Bosporus on one side - and across to Topkapi Palace on the other - are amazing. There's even a huge super-liner in port that I think passed us when we were out on Jan-Olaf's yacht in Oslo Fjord a couple of weeks back. A sense of being at a true crossroads in terms of trade, peoples and cultures.... more >

The Theodosian Walls
Repelling attackers for almost 1,000 years

Carcassonne, I said to Elaine when I first saw the extraordinary land walls of Byzantine Constantinople - and then Peter said that the French stronghold's walls had been modelled on Constantinople's. Rain was sluicing from the heavens as we picked our way around the walls, built between AD412 and 422, during the reign of Theodosius II. Not long after, in 447, an earthquake destroyed no less than 54 of the towers, but they were promptly rebuilt - because Attila the Hun was on the warpath. It wasn't until May 1453 that Mehmet the Conqueror breached the walls, although Eyewitness Travel's Istanbul notes that successive kept them in good condition until the end of the 17th century.... more >

Constantinople
Haghia Sophia, finally ...

Elaine and I flew into Turkey on Saturday, for a study tour on the Ottoman Empire, based in Istanbul. Today, we visited places like the Hippodrome, the Blue Mosque and the church of St Saviour in Chora. But the place that I had wanted to visit since I was a child, and which we visited during the afternoon, was Haghia Sophia.  I would put it on a par with Krak des Chevaliers, Syria, in terms of places that have moved me profoundly. The scaffolding in the interior, ahead of Istanbul's becoming City of Culture in 2010, probably annoys many, but I found the 'stairway to heaven' effect rather appropriate.... more >

Then He Kissed Me
Playing catch-up with the obituaries

While we were in Oslo, I didn't see the papers - and therefore didn't see the obituaries, long one of my great interests, indeed pleasures. Last night, Elaine's sister Christine brought over the half dozen missing copies of The Times and I tore through them this morning, literally. First came Ellie Greenwich, who wrote songs like Be My Baby, Da Doo Ron Ron, River Deep Mountain High and Then He Kissed Me, all long-standing favourites, including more recently on a couple of iPods; Barry Flanagan, whose hare statues Elaine and I have long adored; and then, today, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose version of John Denver's Leaving on a Jet Plane has sometimes seemed to me a suitable anthem for my working life.... more >

Re-enter the Triple Bottom Line
15 years on, it's building up a new head of steaml

As the triple bottom line takes on a new lease of life, illustrated by coverage in recent days by The Economist and Time, the number of requests from MBA and PhD students for background and comment is growing. As I pass on references, it strikes me that it is 15 years since I coined the phrase - 13 years since we published Engaging Stakeholders, the 2-volume report in which we benchmarked early corporate attempts at sustainability reporting, and 12 years since Cannibals with Forks (the book in which I spelled out the TBL agenda) was first published.... more >

International Democracy Day, Yesterday
Better late than never?

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The Eyes Have It
A walk in the Park