John Elkington

 

My profile of entrepreneur Albina Ruiz Rios, executive director of Ciudad Saludable, based in Peru, appears in the January-February issue of Ode Magazine – which spotlights 25 ‘Intelligent Optimists’.

Hawthorn hedging 1 Hawthorn hedging 2 Hawthorn hedging 3

Walking across Barnes Common today, we came across a section of new hawthorn hedging, done by BTCV volunteers.  Wonderful to see, too rarely seen these days, and will keep an eye on it all as it, hopefully, regenerates. Always remember sticking in a short length of willow to stake a rose some 40 years ago, at Hill House, and seeing the stake grow into a 50- or 60-foot tree.  Reassuring. Otherwise have been alternating today between doing a little work, reading, watching films, thinking about digging out the compost and reaching out to old friends and new on Facebook.

 

 

  Branching

Wonderful walk through Richmond Park early this afternoon.  Sunny but cold.  Interesting moment when we came up towards the Ballet School and saw a tumbling ball of birds, involving claw-to-claw fighting between several parakeets and a jackdaw.  There were parakeets sitting on various trees nearby, watched by a scattering of jackdaws.  A brilliant green parakeet head emerged from a hole in the tree shown here, giving us the sense that the two species were fighting for territory.

Herd     Photographer on far left   Afternoon shadowing

On the carpet

2009 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of our family’s move to what was then Clarke’s Hill Farm House, now Hill House, in Little Rissington.  Yesterday, we drove there for lunch and came back late this afternoon.  Odd to be driving without glasses, after all these years.  House abuzz with chiidren of various ages.  

And when I spoke of some Scottish neighbours having come to visit us the previous evening in Barnes, and mentioned that the mother of one of them had been strafed in the streets of Edinburgh by a Luftwaffe bomber, hurling herself behind a garden hedge, we discovered that the Luftwaffe had also had a go at another strategic asset.  Pat, my mother. She had been sitting on a bench in a garden or park south of London, watching a gaggle of three aircraft growing larger on the horizon – and thinking how wonderful the RAF were.  Then one of the planes opened fire on her – “and the bullets came as  close to me as this Aga.”  They missed her, evidently, but sadly went on to bomb a school, with some 60 children ending up in a mass grave, apparently.

Happily, we grew up in a very different world, despite the background of violence in Northern Ireland and Cyprus, where we spent much of the 1950s.  This morning Elaine and I headed across to Icomb and Guy’s Farm, to see the Palmers, who we young Elkingtons grew up alongside after our return to England in 1959. Like the nearby Keays, they had also lived in Africa and then the Middle East in the waning days of Empire, which perhaps gave us all a sense of being misplaced.  But Guy’s farm has always been a home from home,  Indeed, at one point today Elaine demonstrated her exercise regime on the carpet, in front of the fire, for a slightly bemused Rolf (Feichtinger).  

Struck me, when Bunny was talking about how most of the inhabitants of Icomb are now retirees or recent arrivals, that our families have been somewhat of an invasive species in these villages – like the parakeets mentioned in the Richmond Park entry above.  Exotics making a new home, in the process dispossessing – however unwittingly – the original inhabitants.  One particularly exotic denizen of Guy’s Farm we all recalled with great affection today was Phoebe, the Palmers’ African Grey parrot.  Sadly, she has long since ceased to be.

NOTE [16-01-09]: Speaking to my parents this morning, it turns out that the strafing story mentioned above was a little more complicated — and since the blog entry above has already led to Pat being interviewed for a book, am keen to get the story right.  She was actually sitting on a hill top outside Croydon, looking over a great sweep of south-east England, when the planes came in, very low.  They were part of a larger group of Focke-Wulf 190s, each carrying a 500lb bomb.  One reason why they were able to fly so low was that the barrage balloons had been lowered that day, apparently, to calibrate the anti-aircraft guns. And the element of the story of pastoral innocence disrupted that hadn’t been shared with me until this morning was that Pat was wearing uniform and sitting atop an anti-aurcraft battery.  So my sense of grievance that Hermann Göring had sent half his airforce to assassinate my civilian-in-the-park mother-to-be was slightly misplaced.

Head clearly surplus-to-requirements at the Royal Academy

Reindeer, plural

Festive graveyard, Barnes

Church gate, Barnes

Church tower, Barnes

Barnes Pond

Spent most of yesterday spring-cleaning two rooms at home, both of which involved hauling around furniture and shelf-loads of books, washing them and putting them in new constellations.  Weeded the shelves, too, with several stacks of books ready for Oxfam, or whoever will take them.  But I find it excruciatingly difficult to part with books, however long I have had them – they all seem to have one association or another.

Have been using the break to uncouple from the locomotive of my working life, at least to a degree. Emails continue to come in at quite a rate, from round the world.  But have managed to sit and read for hours on end today, finishing two really excellent books: The One From the Other, by Philip Kerr, and La’s Orchestra Saves the World, by Alexander McCall Smith. Once started, I could hardly abandon either, even for the joys of spring-cleaning. Also bought Kerr’s Berlin Noir trilogy on Monday, so am very much looking forward to continuing that thread. 

Have been skimming through endless books as I worked my way around the house, particularly art tomes, with Max Ernst and Peter Randall-Page among those that stick in my mind. Art, including our visit to the Royal Academy a couple of days back, often helps unblock my mental channels. As does walking, though generally I have to be dragged out of the house. Haven’t cycled for months, what with travel and operations, so am missing that severely.

Barnes was like a ghost town as we did a circuit this evening, my limbs aching from my exertions as a hyperactive librarian. The only blot on the landscape was a bunch of people down by the river who were loosing off a cannonade of fireworks, each louder than the last. Could have gladly dropped a skip-load of surplus-to-requirements books on their surplus-to-requirements heads.