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The first Green Swan Prize(s) will be announced at our 10 January 2020 event in London, entitled Tomorrow’s Capitalism: Step Up – Or Get Out Of The Way. The linked agenda for change was trailed at our Green Swan Day event at the Barnes Wetland Centre on 23 June.

Meanwhile, we have been working on the trophy with sculptor Nicola Godden. So yesterday Elaine and I drove across to Dockenfield, near Frensham, to meet Nicola and her husband, Michael Rutherford. Love her work, so loved her studio. Afterwards we all had an excellent lunch at The Holly Bush in Frensham.

I first came across Nicola’s work, without knowing who the artist was, when her huge Uncle Sam-like Hammersmith Man was draped across the top floor of a high-rise office building by the Hammersmith flyover, where Polygram used to be based. I have also long loved her sculpture of Sir Peter Scott, which stands outside the Barnes Wetland Centre.

Here are some images from yesterday:

Across to Geneva on Wednesday night with Richard (Roberts) for a WBCSD session on its Vision 2050 Refresh project. Then a train ride on Tuesday morning with Richard and Julian Hill-Landholt of WBCSD to Vevey, chez Nestlé. Duncan Pollard of Nestlé has seen a recent piece Richard and I had done for a Sustainable Development Goal yearbook and decided it would be a useful provocation.

Bumped into Caroline Seow of the Family Business Network International as we boarded the train – and she and I shuttled back and forth to see each other, at first thinking we were going to the same meeting – and then realising we weren’t.

Great to team up with Peter Bakker for the Vevey session, though it seems we are both feeling equally frustrated with the pace of progress in this space – even with the COP25 climate summit, now moved to Spain from Chile because of the riots in the latter country (even if Spain has had its moments recently with Catalonia), imminent.

Then in too the office yesterday, Friday, despite the ongoing train strike in London (though to date it hasn’t much affected me) and the fact that Fridays are now work-from-home days. First to have lunch with Clara Barby of the Impact Management Project, then an impromptu meeting with Luke Nicholson, and later a get-together with Simone Amber (who I once worked with when she was with Schlumberger, developing her SEED initiative aimed at the educational sector) and her sons, Jonathan (who works with the OECD) and Oliver (Bloomberg News).

Elaine spotted a large article in The Times about Sacha Dench, known as “The Human Swan”. So impressed were we that I got in touch via LinkedIn and email – and it just happened she was in Holborn that day, 2 December, so we agreed to meet in Somerset House. Blown away by her – and now she’s speaking at our Tomorrow’s Capitalism event, sub-titled ‘Step Up – Or Get Out Of The Way’.

Just back from a couple of days in Köln, Germany, with Covestro, running one of our new format Imaginariums alongside Louise (Kjellerup Roper), Richard (Roberts) and Julia (Rebholz). It seemed to go extremely well – with very positive feedback from participants. Encouraging – and a great addition to our Imaginarium series, where we have already worked with The Body Shop International and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA).

2019 has been a year to remember, with both my father, Tim, dying on 1 February, while Elaine and I were in Copenhagen, and my mother, Pat, dying this week, on 19 November. In her case, after a long illness that had her confined to bed – dependent on my three siblings and various forms of nursing and end-of-life care, including the magnificent Kate’s Home Nursing. Both died at home, with family members around, a real privilege in these days of increasingly institutionalised care.

As her younger brother, Paul, put it to me today, “Pat, my sister, your mother, was a most remarkable being – she was very close and dear to me all my life and a prop and mainstay in troubled times. She had what I can only describe as a ‘glow’ – almost an aura that even shows in photographs of her over the years, she will be most sorely missed by us all, and leaving us she has taken with her much love and many memories.” She was certainly an extraordinary story-teller.

Recalling her in happier times, and her first use of headphones, the first image is of her in the Hill House kitchen. I had recorded her talking about the poltergeist that haunted her as a child, when her parents were divorcing, and the ghost that she was convinced haunted (in a positive way) the end of Hill House where there is a 400-year-old oak staircase. We knew her as Belinda. The story goes, though we heard it long after Pat first saw a mob-capped girl sitting at the foot of her bed, that a young maid fell down the stairs and broke her neck.

The second image, below, honours the huge responsibility her generation carried, symbolised by the Soviet/Russian veterans coming up to see her in bed after Tim’s memorial service. His photo, with great-grandson Gene on his lap, is in the background. The woman in red hat a former partisan, the only person from her entire town to survive WWII. A world of ghosts.

Pat and Tim voted the wrong way on Brexit, she saying the chimney-sweep told her to do so, but we loved them nonetheless!

She would have loved the fact that I was at Buckingham Palace the day after she died, though the sacking of Prince Andrew would not have escaped her notice or comment.

Her views didn’t always follow well-worn tracks, though she would most definitely not have approved of the way in which the monarchy was being dragged through hedges backwards by the shenanigans of the Queen’s favourite son. But she would definitely have approved of the way half a dozen grey vacuum cleaners were arrayed in one space I passed en route to the Billiards room, lined up in regimental order.