Just coming to the end of a fortnight of working from home, coupled with flashes of staycation. Coincided with figs ripening in the garden. And an opportunity to do things like: finally get a large sofa for our newish Somerset House offices; entertain friends; visit Kew Gardens, to see the Dale Chihuly exhibitions and have lunch overlooking the Palm House; visit Gaia’s dazzling floral display chez Roland Mouret; and trundle across to Oxford to see the Last Supper in Pompeii exhibition at the Ashmolean – and have lunch with Geoff (Lye) and Sarah (Ellis).
On the work front, I went back and forth with Fast Company Press, the publishers of my new book, all going very well; did some outreach for both Volans and for the Business Declares Network, where I am now on the Board; worked with Lisa Goldapple to evolve our film on Green Swans and Regenerative Capitalism, due out later this month; and developed a piece for HBR.org, due out tomorrow, in response to the Business Roundtable’s statement on the future of capitalism.
Perhaps inevitably, another book idea began to bubble, too, spurring a good deal of background research into areas I don’t normally probe.
We also watched a fair amount of television (including glorious programmes like the last of Jim Al-Khalili’s Revolutions series, focusing on telescopes and the last one, on robots and artificial intelligence) and last night finally watched a DVD of Bohemian Rhapsody, utterly joyous.
And I read for England, while feeling increasingly angry about the direction that the Johnson regime is taking the country in. Looks as though I will be out on the streets again soon.
Books I particularly enjoyed, or at least found fascinating, included Diarmid Ferriter’s The Border, Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality, and, on the fiction front, and in the sequence in which I read them, Gareth Rubin’s Liberation Square, Joanna Kavenna’s ZED (am minded to buy everything she has ever written) and Pat Barker’s exquisite The Silence of the Girls – the last exquisite in Barker’s use of language, not in subject matter. Intriguing that all three are by the same publisher, Penguin Random House.
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