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Amazing how one’s memory can drift over time. Our daughter Hania sent us this link to an amateur film made in Barnes, London, by John McCready in 1974 – the year before we arrived from central London.

At one level very little seems to have changed, and yet the film can’t show the construction of the river wall, that occluded the Thames to a degree; the village pond that drained overnight and had to be restored over quite some years; the fire that raged through the church, in the event providing the opportunity to rebuild in a wonderful way; and the intensification of flights overhead into nearby Heathrow, a nuisance that has been radically abated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interesting, too, to see the building in the High Street where Gaia (aged perhaps 3 or 4) and I stopped to watch a coral reef on a colour TV screen. She dropped to a crouch and was utterly rapt. Case made. I went in within days to buy a tiny but wonderful for those days) Sony Trinitron colour TV – and it provided a remarkable window into the natural world.

If only we had been able to see then the sort of TV screens that are increasingly standard today. They would have seemed more like a cinema. And that’s another thing that has changed. The music studios where people like The Beatles, The Byrds and Queen recorded, is now a cinema. Or at least it was until the virus hit – hope it will still be when the pandemic subsides.

Cheering news via the Sustainable Eel Group, which we helped release 30,000 elvers back in 2014. That was a happy day:

I have never much liked the idea of fan clubs, but it’s a little different when you attract elements of your own. The launch of Green Swans on 7 April triggered an extraordinary groundswell of good will and enthusiasm, with abundant commentary on social media and a growing number of major media channels covering the book.

Here is a screenshot of the Financial Times review, pairing the book with Rebecca Henderson’s impending book, Reimagining Capitalism. The first time that I have been described as an “elder statesman” of the sustainability field …

Other mainstream media coverage has included pieces by Forbes and Reuters, with last week also seeing publication of a short piece by Board Intelligence. among the coverage on GreenBiz was this write-up by Shane Downing of an interview I did with GreenBiz Editor-in-Chief Joel Makower. Articles by me on related themes have appeared in places like the BMW Foundation’s TwentyThirty platform, Ethical Corporation, GreenBiz and Sustainable Brands.

Working with Louise Kjellerup Roper’s son Noah, I also created a map of the “Green Swan World Tour” to date, which has been posted on the Green Swans page of the Volans website. It plots activities from California to Japan, from Norway to South Africa, and from Australia to the United Arab Emirates.

In fact, recent weeks have been a blizzard of podcasts and webcasts and webinars and the like. Here are a few of the events:

We have also launched a Green Swans Bookclub via Goodreads, where I did the first one and Denise Hearn the second, that one focusing on her book The Myth of Capitalism.

The reactions on Green Swans have been pretty much uniformly positive to date – but why the sense of the fan club dynamic? Well, it’s because of the photos people have been posting of the book in the context of their own lives, as in the following:

By no means finally, we soft-launched our new Green Swan Observatory in my keynote for the Catapult Cloud event hosted from Oslo on 19 May. The idea is to scout for, analyse and support emergent Green Swan trajectories around the world. The next stepping stone will be my webinar in Tokyo (see below, though again done from our front study in Barnes) on 5 June, World Environment Day 2020.

Well, they have almost certainly been there for a while, but today is the first time I have noticed the extraordinary proliferation of Asian clams in the River Thames as we walked along the Barnes foreshore.

Elaine and I had walked around the Leg ‘O Mutton reservoir, only to find ourselves, as is our habit, going counter-clockwise – when everyone else had read the signs and were going clockwise, to ensure social distancing. So I guided Elaine down some seriously slimy steps onto the foreshore – which is where I spotted the clams, both alive and dead.

Initially, I took them for good news, thinking any proliferation of life must be good. Then I looked them up. Something of an ecological and industrial nightmare. Gaia suggested clam chowder later in the day, but eating filter feeders direct from the Thames hardly seems like an entirely sensible idea …

Because of the mention elsewhere on this site of Glencot, the preparatory school Gray and I went to in the 1960s, a fair few fellow inarcerees have got in touch over the years. Some have got in touch with old friends via the site. This week Gray sorted out some old photos to send to the most recent one to get in touch, Francisco Caralps, from Chile. This was me back then, perhaps 1960 or 1961. Pre-Beatles, clearly. What was I thinking the future held?