What an extraordinary time we had of it in Trouville and Deauville. Utterly relaxing – and glorious to get to know our grandson Gene a bit better. Can’t wait to go back.
Beached In Trouville
A few days away in Normandy
Read much of Robin Niblett’s book, The New Cold War, on the Eurostar to Paris yesterday. Wonderfully written, but pretty bracing. That said, it’s surprising how quickly I have relaxed in the new surroundings of Trouville – it used to take me several days to “land”. The weather has been kind, if also pretty bracing when we were on the beach this afternoon.
And bad news landed while we were at lunch in Les Voiles in Trouville, which threw an unexpected shadow over the proceedings. Still, we made our way across to Honfleur to see the Naturospace butterfly collection and to walk around Honfleur, which I had wanted to visit again since we passed through some time in the 1980s.
It’s Time To Channel Your Inner 5-Year-Old
My latest Substack post, discussing last week’s trip to Porto Alegre, Brazil, can be found here. Great fun! And spurred a number of new lines of thought.
Churchill Fellowship Diplomacy
The launch event for my Ambassadorship described as “a triumph”
Lucy Parker and I (photo: Julia Hailes)
Gaia, Elaine and Hania (photo: Julia Hailes)
Richard Nugee (centre) reunited with friends (photo: John Elkington)
Earlier this evening, we held the first “In Conversation With …” event for the Churchill Fellowship, my first event as a CF Ambassador, and their first ambassadorship. My take on all of this – on why we are seeing the “end of the beginning” when it comes to the sustainability agenda – is described here. A video of the evening can be found here.
Lucy Parker of Brunswick Group – and Chair of the CF Advisory Council – and I were introduced by CF CEO Julia Weston and CF Chair Jeremy Soames. Jeremy later described the event as “a triumph.” The key thing, for me, though, was that it helped induct a fairly wide range of people to the existence of the Fellowship – and to consider who might be suitable applicants for the next round of Fellowships.
Among those participating were people like Generation Investment Management CEO David Blood, Sir Dave Lewis (former CEO of Tesco and now Chair of WWF-UK), and Paul and Kim Polman – he a former CEO of Unilever. We also managed to include a fair number of younger people, including students from places I teach at like Cranfield University, Imperial College and UCL.
Many highlights of the evening, but one I only heard of towards the end was that Lt-Gen Richard Nugee, who I had first met through his work on climate change for the Ministry of Defence and then had on our Anthropy platform last year, was unexpectedly reunited with two people from his old regiment – friends, if I understood it all, he hadn’t seen for almost 40 years. They were already planning to meet for dinner in a few weeks.
Now, that’s impact!
Kate Hutchinson of Yorkshire Sustainability Week (photo: Julia Hailes)
Substack Adventures
I experiment with a new channel.
A few weeks ago, I opened a new Substack channel, Surfing the Future. It won’t replace this blog, but it may mean that at times some content that might have appeared here will appear there.
The latest post, my twentieth, reflects on a fascinating week of visits and conversations that helped me refine my thinking on various aspects of system change. It also explains the dragon image above, topical because this is the Year of the Dragon and relevant because of the varying symbolism of dragons in the East and West.
The hummingbird, our Volans mascot, symbolises my year-long quest to work out how I can best advance the change agenda once I have reached the age of 75 in June.