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Repairs in progress Jieying’s banner Chinese boots View from 2BP

The week started with two days in Horgen, Switzerland, at the annual Sustainable Asset Management (SAM) conference. First day didn’t grab me, but second day was livelier – and I met some interesting new people. The snow fell pretty much throughout the proceedings.

When I got back, the 2 Bloomsbury Place office was thinly populated, with Sam in Gujerat and our two Canadians – Charmian and Amy (Birchall) – leading a study tour of London and Oxford for nine Chinese foundations. Still, some very interesting visitors through the week, including Lily Lapenna of MyBnk, and the Chinese tour team yesterday – when we had some 15 people to lunch. Typically, the staircase was crowded in by a chap with a huge ladder trying to fix a leaking roof over our rather critical ‘Ladies’, just before the tour arrived, but happily the landing was clear by the time they came laughing up the stairs.

Elaine came in to help and I enormously enjoyed the conversations. Several of the visitors enthusiastically took photographs of the banner that Zheng Jieying had done for me after her internship – and which Alejandro and I had pinned up earlier in the day.

Weirdly, the British Council brought a gift to celebrate the tour, a leaping silver fish made by the Miao people of China. I asked whether they had chosen it because of the Volans association with the flying fish – and they said they had had no idea. Complete serendipty. It will join the flying fish painting Alejandro and Sarah gave me for my 60th birthday last year – and the print of the flying fish sequence from The Life of Pi, see my 29 February blog entry – on the wall of the 2BP ‘salon’.

A box of chocolates that David Hertz of the Brazilian social enterprise Gastromotiva brought in for me a week or two back on his way back to Brazil from Vietnam. The Chinese gobbled them up. Once everyone had gone and we had finished the washing up and hoovering (the picture under the banner in the second photo down above, is of me hoovering ahead of the Volans/my 60th birthday party last June), I savoured the afternoon-sun-illuminated trees in the garden, and then we headed home – stopping off at Peter Jones to look at potential coffee machines for Volans.

Today I was out early, for a session with a physio under Barnes Bridge.  Lower back problems. Glorious, low sun and thick frost. The Moon was astounding last night, pretty much full – and literally flooding the house with its light. Must take the binoculars out this evening and see if I can see anything of Mars.

 

Have been working through the day on the proposal for the new book – and on the latest round of six columns, with three CDs mainly in the background. Rufus Wainwright’s Poses was one, which I bought this week after reading of the death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle. Sam has often played his music when we are working late and I like it tremendously. Even more invigorating, though, have been two other CDs I bought at the same time – The Birth of Surf, a collection of early US surf music, and Board Boogie, accurately billed as “Surf ‘N’ Twang from Down Under”.

Bands I had never heard of, among them The Aztecs, The Joy Boys, The Nocturnes, The Surf Riders, The Resonets, The Vibratones, The Sunsets, Laurie Wade’s Cavaliers, The Dee Jays and The Playboys.  Could scarcely be more different from Poses, but found myself enjoying quite as much as Dick Dale & The Del-Tones, Duane Eddy & The Rebels, Link Wray & His Raymen, The Ventures and The Surfaris. Those really were the days, before Beatlemania struck like a musical tsunami, wiping out many of the surf music bands.

Thank heavens for recording technology, in all its infinite variety. One of the books I bought recently is Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, the story of recorded music. One of the things that has always fascinated me is the difference between music as experienced live and as recorded and reproduced. The band that, for me, showed the difference most dramatically in the 1960s was Fairport Convention.

And, just maybe, the extraordinary volume of their concerts could have contributed to the hearing loss and tinnitus that took me to see a specialist in Harley Street this week. On the list of technology I have so far refused I can now add a hearing aid to a pacemaker. Which puts me in mind on another Sixties band of Liverpudlians.

Two French friends from decades back came to lunch today – he is a psychologist and has been working in two prisons in Provence for around seven years, focusing on murderers and sexual offenders. Says he enjoys it – and has been fighting for the rights to health of such prisoners. 

Separately, it’s sad how thoughtful people see France becoming increasingly right-wing and intolerant under the current regime.

Then, in the evening, Elaine and I went across to Charlotte Street to have dinner with another friend, Will Rosenzweig of Physic Ventures at Roka. Wonderful evening – and the trains and Tube worked quite spectacularly well, with a maximum wait of all four connections happing within a minute or so. I took as book, Physics for Future Presidents by Richard A. Muller, but didn’t get a chance to start it.

Image of the Barnes wetland centre

I always loved grandparents – and engaging with their generation of friends. So when it came to environmentalism, which I fell backwards into in the early 1960s, raising funds for the embryonic WWF in 1961, it was perhaps only natural that the likes of Gerald Durrell, Max Nicholson and Peter Scott felt like adoptive (but distant) grandparents. I recall reading Durrell’s books when very young and impressionable (coincidentally, BBC4 re-ran a film version of My Family & Other Animals last night, after a stunning film by Professor Armand Leroi exploring the lagoon off Lesvos where Aristotle practically invented biology) and visiting the Scotts’ Slimbridge wildlife reserve when at prep school at Glencot in Somerset.

Much, much later, I came to work with Max in founding Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, with the late David Layton. I met Durrell at a preview of one of Phil Agland’s films sometime in the mid-1980s – and found him delightful. Sir Peter I had met when he was one of the judges for the Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowships, one of which I was awarded in 1981. He was wonderfully supportive. I met him again in Guiting Power, shortly before he died, with Lady Scott – who was enchanting. I remember her telling me that my presentation had left her “fizzing with energy”, but then I suspect that was her default setting.

Her obituary appears in The Times today, along with a couple of tremendously evocative photographs. This mentions the book, The Art of Peter Scott, a copy of which I was recently sent by WWF, which he co-founded with Max and others in 1961, and where I am now a member of the Council of Ambassadors. The book has been in the Volans office for a month or so, on one of our new book stands, open on a double-page spread that features a glider – which, alongside all those graceful wildfowl winging through Scott-rendered skies, nicely captures the sense of uplift and possibility that we stretch towards at Volans.

Apart from the book, I think of the Scotts every time we wander round the corner in Barnes to the wetland wildlife reserve that he played such a key role in creating. What an extraordinary couple they were!

Piccard’s solar plane

My last blog entry, on Avatar, triggered a number of responses via various channels, with Claudia Gonella responding via Facebook – and suggesting that I take a look at Bertrand Piccard‘s TED speech from last year. I did, over breakfast this morning, and was completely blown away. Fascinating that his father, Jacques, and grandfather, Auguste, were both explorers – whose adventures inspired me as a boy, though my fear of heights and enclosed spaces made it extremely unlikely that I would follow in either of their footsteps.

Bertrand Piccard, however, did – though while his grandfather went up into the heavens and his father went down into the depths of the Mariana Trench, he has chosen to go sideways, around the world in balloons. I love his use of the ballooning metaphor to spotlight and discuss the challenge our civilization faces in weaning itself off fossil fuels – and plugging into renewable energy. Will be watching closely the next steps with his innovative solar plane.

With my transfer to Volans in the past couple of years, I resonated strongly with his comments about the need to jettison certain types of ballast as you try to find the right altitude to pick up the winds that can carry you in the right direction and, hopefully, at the right speed. Happily, the past week has seen much more joint working between Volans and SustainAbility, with a strong updraft now building under both sets of wings.