Early start in 123 Buckingham Palace Road, with PA Consulting and the UN Global Compact. A Management Today article celebrated the “Willy Wonka World” of PA – and the session was certainly full of delights, particularly the beta version of a map of tomorrow’s technology.
Afterwards, I took a cab back to the office, in an attempt to get back quicker for a session on a client. The cab driver had an Armed Forces Fund sticker on the window between the compartments. So I asked whether he had been in the armed forces? The RAF, it turned out, for 22 years as a fitter, leaving in 2006.
We exchanged a series of stories as we headed across to Bloomsbury. Among the ones he told me was of picking up an elderly couple at the Tower of London, when the poppy installation (see below) was on display. They were clinging on to each other like teenagers in love, so he assumed they were married. But it turned out that they were brother and sister – and had been evacuated to different parts of the country during the Blitz.
They explained that they had not seen each other for 75 years, despite searching for one another, and had just stumbled across each other at the Tower, simply by asking each other why they were there, where they were from, and so on. They said they never wanted to be parted again.
He then told a story about someone he used to know who looted a truck of Nazi gold in WWII, bought five cottages on the proceeds, but keep the deeds in a Rose’s chocolate tin and mentioned them to nobody, for fear of detection. It’s amazing where everyday conversations can take you …
It consisted of 888,246 handmade ceramic poppies, each representing a British fatality during World War I – and created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins and stage designer Tom Piper.
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