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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.

The Throne and I

Quite a week, as the jalopy sped towards Christmas.  Eyes still settling down after surgery, though periodically I can almost see over the horizon. Am sporting a temporary pair of reading glasses rather akin to those worn by Dame Edna Everage, which teeter on the point of my nose – as shown in the above image, taken during a session on accounting for sustainability at St James’s Palace. Rather more gold in evidence that day than I am normally comfortable with.  Was late for the event, owing to earlier session with Accenture, but did at least arrive in time for lunch.

Week was a blizzard of meetings and brown-bag lunches, one of the most interesting of the latter being with Jamie Mitchell of innocent.  Late in the week, we had a meeting of the Trustees of the Environment Foundation  at 2 Bloomsbury Place, the upshot of which is that Halina Ward looks set to become the Foundation’s new Director, which is really great news.  Our focus now will be very much on the ‘Democracy & Sustainability’ theme that we spotlighted earlier in the year at the Science Museum event.  Only sadness is that (Sir) Geoffrey Chandler will be standing down as a Trustee.  Received a wonderful card from him today, the front of which shows six images of a Trinidad Emperor (Morpho peleides insularis) emerging from its pupa, which Geoffrey took in 1968.  He also bred the butterfly. 

There seemed to be a spate of media things during the week, including my interview appearing in Le Monde, a quote in The Christan Science Monitor in a piece on Japan and my profile of Albina Ruiz Rios (executive director, Ciudad Saludable, based in Lima, Peru) appearing in the January-February issue of Ode magazine. Have also been cranking out a number of articles and columns, including one for Director magazine today in which I draw on Van Jones’s book The Green Collar Economy.

Have been buying books left, right and centre this week, but with little sense that I will ever get around to reading them all – seem to remember hearing that it  was a sign of something when you found yourself buying more books than you could possibly read.  But one of them, My Lord, fell open in my hands in the bookshop at an extraordinarily significant page.  This was The Economist Book of Obituaries, and pages 184-185 carry an obituary of Karl Kehrle, or Brother Adam, the Benedictine monk who did so much to save British bees.  His Buckfast bee was widely exported.  We went to see him in the 1980s, when I was still thinking of using the beehives and honey separator I had been given by Kerry Effingham, who had inherited them from an elderly relative who had just fallen offf his perch. 

The bit of the obituary I particularly enjoyed noted that Brother Adam, having had the last rites read several times after a series of heart attacks, would still keep clambering out of bed to see how his bees were doing.  But the obituary that still lives on most energetically in my memory was that of Kerry’s erstwhile husband, the Earl of Effingham.  One of the most extraordinary pieces of (richly deserved) hatchet work I have yet seen.

On our way to Waterstone’s last night, where we successfully tracked down a copy of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s only novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, we dropped into Whole Food Markets in Kensington on our way home last night, to buy their wonderful sourdough bread, and bought a few bottles of wine too.  One I picked up in passing was Sustainable Red, from Mendocino also and billed as from locally owned and operated farms, protecting the environment, and all wrapped up in earth-friendly packaging, carbon neutrality and solar power.  Wonderful story, but shame about the wine.

Mention of Leigh Fermor reminds me of the time I asked Geoffrey Chandler, who had also been in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during WWII, whether he had ever met Leigh Fermor, whose writing Elaine and I had long loved.  He said he hand’t seen him since they had been busily loading a Jeep, I think it was, onto a caique, I think it was, in Alexandria Harbour, I’m pretty sure it was.  And the Jeep was full of gold coins destined to pay off partisans in one or other theatre of war in which the two of them had recently been causing havoc.

Finally, a third gold thread.  While trying the Sustainable Red last night, we watched Richard Attenborough’s film Closing the Circle, partly set in Belfast.  One of the stars, Mischa Barton, who went to the same school as Gaia and Hania, ended up with a sister called Hania, while another family ended up with a cat called Gaia, if memory serves.  Amazing how the film brought back Northern Ireland, where we libved in the 1950s, outside Limavady.  And the story here focused on a gold wedding ring, lost and found.

Maquette of ‘The Angel of the North’   With this image I took a couple of months back in the entry of the British Museum of a large maquette of Anthony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’, I send my best wishes for Christmas and the New Year to everyone with an interest in this website and the wider world it represents.  For me, at least, the photograph captured the expansive, embracing-the-future, waiting-to-fly spirit of Volans in its first year.  At the back of my mind, though, is the question whether we will look back at 2009 rather like we now look back at 1929 or 1939 … or, more positively in some ways, 1989.

 

 

 

Alex Nick at SustainAbility has made this little video with me (as a straddler of SustainAbility and Volans) in my first starring role of December — alongside himself (he’s German), Kavita Prakash-Mani (she’s Indian, based at SustainAbility), Patrin (she’s from Thailand and SustainAbility) and Sam (she’s of African Asian origins and a Volander).  I quite liked it ….

Rupert and audience (Sam Lakha)

Fish on the menu today.  Rupert Howes of the Marine Stewardship Council came in to do a lunch-time session with team members from Volans and SustainAbility.  MSC have made extraordinary progress in recent years, but the scale of the challenges the world faces is horrendous. Rupert described the collapse of oceanic fisheries as second only to climate change in terms of global importance.  Very lively session.  Rupert, who I first met when he was at Forum for the Future, is an inspirational leader and speaker — we could have continued for much of the day.  Had to apologise early on about my blinking eye: post-op tic rather than my trying to send significant signals.

Global fisheries trending towards collapse (Sam Lakha)   Later in the day, talking to Environmental Defense: Charmian, me, Alejandro (Sam Lakha)