Under the Bean Tree

Blackberries under Indian bean tree Beehive – and bees Sam inspects beans Autumnal bench Dominoes at Walton Hall (last night)

We celebrated a sunny 1 October by shooting a video for Monica Araya and the 10:10 Campaign, which aims to help individuals, companies, cities, schools and so on cut their energy consumption – and, critically, their carbon footprints. The sequence will be used to launch the campaign in Costa Rica later this month, in fact, fittingly, on 10 October.

We tried to film in Bloomsbury Square, across the road, but it was a bit too noisy, so we retreated into 2 Bloomsbury Place’s “secret garden” – where Sam filmed me under what I think is an Indian bean tree. Very interested, too, to see that someone has installed a beehive in the garden. 

Elaine, just in today from a couple of weeks in Canada, has brought back a honeycomb from Doug and Margot Miller’s 100–acre property north of Toronto, where they now have around 40 hives.

The picture of the plastic draughts board comes from Walton Hall, near Stratford-upon-Avon, where I had headed yesterday evening, to speak at a National Grid sustainability event. Very nice crowd, though I almost stumbled with my first presentation using Apple’s Keynote software – couldn’t make it work properly on screen, despite it having worked earlier, so headed back to my room to rewrite the thing in PowerPoint. Today, Alejandro (Litovsky) used perseverance and trial-and-error to work out what I should have done. Simple, as it turned out.

One slight surprise: Juliana Grando of National Grid had brought along the slideshow and notes from a course she was taught at university which specifically covered my “thought and work”. Rather an odd feeling to be taught in this way, but rather cheering, too.