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Flew back from Turkey on Saturday, then off to Berlin on Sunday, 5 October. Across to Antica Lasagneria to speak at a dinner hosted by our friends at BSD Consulting.

Walls of the restaurant sport a glorious collections of black and white photographs of major politicians, including one of Joschka Fischer – who I debated with at a conference way back in 1989, in Wiesbaden.

Then back to Soho House, where I am staying. The place has an extraordinary history. As their website sums it up: Originally opened in 1928 as a department store, the property was seized by the wartime government before being occupied by the post-war, Communist regime until 1956. It was then used to house the Communist Party archives and the Central Committee’s Historical Institution. After German reunification the building was legally returned to the descendants of its original owners.

Up early to keynote the BSD Reporting 3.0 conference in the Microsoft Atrium. Photos of the session show me squinting a little as I try to get used to life (pro ten) without the glasses I managed to destroy in Turkey.

Had a range of useful sidebar meetings with  people in the field, including Michael Meehan, the new CEO of the Global Reporting Initiative. Then back to Soho House with Sam for a Skype call with Astrid Hvam Høgsted, who is part of our Breakthrough project team. We make great progress in the process.

In the evening, we co-hosted – and I spoke at – the Berlin launch of The Breakthrough Challenge, held in the library of Soho House.

Tuesday started with a meeting with Peter (Teuscher) and Sebastian (Straub) of BSD, after which we headed across to Impact Solutions – for a lunch with our friends Tell (Münzing) and Shamin (Rafat), and colleagues. This was followed by a working session with them and Johnson & Johnson.

Then a session with Shamim and Tell on joint strategy, after which we all had dinner with senior executives of DeutscheBahn (DB), on the top floor of their tower. Our host was Dr Karl-Friedrich Rausch, a member of the DN Management Board, who I had met at a previous Berlin dinner for business leaders hosted by Impact solutions at, yes, Soho House. Fascinating, off-the-record conversations.

Then, earlier today, I keynoted the sixth Humboldt University conference on Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility. Congratulations to (dR) Joachim (Schwalbach) for making this all happen.

Some fascinating speakers, including Tima Bansal. Then did a panel discussion with Tima, Joep Browers, Timothy Devinney and Toby Webb. Pleased to have a chance to catch up with Bob Eccles, who – among many other things – is a member of our Advisory Board.

Sadly, I then had to scoot off to Tegel airport to catch my flight to Bern. But that’s another story – or blog.

Odd to search back through this website and find (in Elaine’s blog at the time) that I had been injured in a cycling accident shortly before we came last time, in 2011.

That time, a cycle courier hit me at the drouth end of Bloomsbury Square, whereas a couple of months before we travelled this time I had to throw myself to one side on my bike in Oxford Street to avoid two young Russian girls who dived out into the road ahead of me. I haven’t cycled since and the bruises are still coming out of my elbow and wrist, though I think the salt water must have helped.

Third time lucky?

When you begin such a holiday, it seems that it will go on forever, and some part of me wishes it could. But as I watched the sun rise over the castle this morning, I knew I was deeply rested and restored and, because I had to, was ready to head home.

We sailed into Bodrum harbour yesterday morning with the castle projecting long-gone power. It proved to be a gentle day, strolling around the town, and including a trek up to the restored Greek theatre, with its glorious views of the town and harbour.

As Andrew’s notes reminded us, this was the ancient Halicarnassus, capital of the Hecatomnid king Mausolus. His wife (also she was also his sister) built the famous Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders, with many of the remains now to be found in the British Museum.

My much-loved, much-abused (in terms of being left behind here, there and more or less everywhere) Leica D-Lux 6 finally ran out of power just as we began the walk along to the castle, so I took it back to the boat – and we proceeded without.

The display of the Bronze Age wreck from Uluburun in the castle museum is breathtaking. First found by a sponge-diver in 1982, it yielded a veritable treasure trove of finds, as listed here.

Although the castle was originally designed as a killing machine, these days it has a wonderfully peaceful feeling to it, especially with all the trees and the peacocks inside its walls.

Later, after dinner, we hunkered down for a noisy night, but it wasn’t too bad. (Incidentally, it strikes me I haven’t yet mentioned the her, who achieved major culinary miracles below deck – and had us all wondering which film star he most reminded us of.) Overall, we have been pretty fortunate sonically this time.

We have also been very lucky with our ship-mates. Indeed, Elaine hugged the crew goodbye.

Over the two weeks I have managed to get through a fair few books, two of which I passed on to Andrew: Alan Furst’s Midnight in Europe and Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. This was the first Amis book I had read, and while I came with low expectations I found its treatment of the Holocaust stunning.

When proposing a thank-you toast to Andrew the other night, I joked that we were already making plans for our third Lycian adventure. As I reflected on the two weeks on the flights back to London (TK2509 to Istanbul, TK1991 to LHR), I wondered whether this might prove to be less of a joke and more of a pledge to self?

This evening, the ACE Players (Lycia 2014 troupe), aided and abetted by Mary (Wright), performed what Andrew allowed was a heavily abridged version of Agamemnon, by Aeschylus.

The opening scene: the Palace of Agamemnon. (Night, a little before sunrise.) As it happened, the sun set and the dark rose as the drama progressed.

Even though we had an ‘official’ Programme Seller, in the shape of Marjorie, I chose – once again – to be in the audience. And was glad of it. Spending much of my working life performing on stages around the world, this would have been too much like work. But it also gave me a new sense of how tremendously moving Greek drama can be.

A remarkable evening.

One of the loveliest sites I have come across, Knidos straddles a twin harbour. British archaeologist Charles Newton noted in his diary in 1858, when he was excavating at Knidos:

“If Halicarnassus could boast of its Mausoleum, and Rhodes of its bronze Colossus, the little state of Cnidus could point with just pride to its statue of Aphrodite, the masterpiece of Praxiteles, in exchange for which Nicomedes, king of Bithynia (north of the Aegean Region), offered to redeem the whole public debt of the city…” 

The story of the extraordinary statue of Aphrodite and how it came to be made by Praxiteles is well worth digging into. Would love to have seen it in its heyday. Considered profoundly shocking at the time, the revolutionary nude statue has occasioned much subsequent comment.

A fascinating site to walk around. As we walked east to see a further set of ruins, though still within the old city walls, I came across the desiccated body of a baby sea turtle. I imagine it must have been dropped there by a predator like a gull. In any event, I didn’t feel comfortable until I had taken it back to the sea shore and ‘released’ it into the water.

Later, as we were walking back along the jetty, having drunk a modicum of Ifes beer and raki, and also having eaten some delicious battered calamari, we were reminded of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind sources of what we eat.

I knelt down to show Elaine a strange sea caterpillar, perhaps seven inches long, crawling over rocks in the water by the jetty. Then a bearded fisherman hove in view – and spotted the octopus I was also tracking. He promptly snagged it with a fishing hook and line, battering (in a different sense) it to death on the concrete surface of the jetty. Amazing what a will to live such creatures have.

Back, once again, to dinner on the deck – and then to sleep, moored in the harbour.

Cruised along the Loryma Peninsula to Loryma harbour, where we weighed anchor and made our way up the Hellenistic fortress that overlooks the anchorage. It is believed to have been built by the Rhodians after they resisted the siege led by Demetrius Poliorcetes, son of Alexander the Great’s successor, Antigonus the One Eyed.

The idea: to stop the harbour being used again to launch an attack from the mainland. Indeed, it is extraordinary to think that this harbour hosted some 400 ships bound to attack Rhodes. The siege failed, however, and the Rhodians, having sold the left-over siege engines, decided to build the Colossus.

Interesting, though, that the giant statue of Helios would stand for only 56 years before an earthquake snapped it off at the knees.