Journal

Amy, Ivana, Patrin and Sam Sam, Jeff and Patrin

Delightful surprise this evening when Jeff Erikson – who has long run SustainAbility’s Washington, DC office – came across to 2 Bloomsbury Place with Patrin Watanatada of SustainAbility UK and Ivana Gazibara, who used to be part of our London team and is now with Forum for the Future. A useful glass of our favourite wine of the moment, a Californian red from Cline, the Ancient Vines Carignane. Lovely to gather round what Patrin calls the Volans hearth, and catch up. Then out into the rain for the journey west.

Before 1 Before 2 Michael Portillo in full flow Alan Sugar and Michael Portillo Mervyn Jones, Chairman of Aquamarine Power

Across to the Lancaster Hotel in heavy rain for the Director of the Year Awards, organised by the Institute of Directors. Found myself on a table right at the front with people from the Director magazine team, including Richard Cree. I had been one of the judges for the Director of the Year for Environmental Leadership Award.

Michael Portillo was an excellent chairman of the event, though I don’t always subscribe to his politics. He made a delightful comparison between the social dynamics of a meerkat group he had been involved in filming recently for a documentary (in which the dominant female chases other females out into the desert to die, and eats their pups, her system flooded with testosterone) and his time with Mrs Thatcher. I’m sure he’s told the tale before …

In any event, the short-list for the Environmental Leadership Award was: Mervyn Jones of Aquamarine Power, Duncan Goose of Global Ethics, Ian Jackson of Imerja, Nick Heaton of EnviroVent, Julian Dennis of Wessex Water and Pat McGarry of the Henderson Group. Was pleased when Aquamarine Power got the Award: they had come top of my list.

Aquamarine Power is a wave energy company, who I first came across during a cleantech tour of California. They have head offices in Edinburgh, Scotland and further operations in Orkney and Northern Ireland.  The company is developing its flagship technology, an innovative hydro-electric wave energy converter, known as Oyster.  Aquamarine Power’s goal is to develop commercial Oyster wave farms around the world.

The first demonstration-scale Oyster has been successfully deployed at sea at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, Scotland and was officially launched by Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond MP, MSP in November 2009 when it began producing power to the National Grid to power homes in Orkney and beyond. 

Oyster wave energy device

Blackberries under Indian bean tree Beehive – and bees Sam inspects beans Autumnal bench Dominoes at Walton Hall (last night)

We celebrated a sunny 1 October by shooting a video for Monica Araya and the 10:10 Campaign, which aims to help individuals, companies, cities, schools and so on cut their energy consumption – and, critically, their carbon footprints. The sequence will be used to launch the campaign in Costa Rica later this month, in fact, fittingly, on 10 October.

We tried to film in Bloomsbury Square, across the road, but it was a bit too noisy, so we retreated into 2 Bloomsbury Place’s “secret garden” – where Sam filmed me under what I think is an Indian bean tree. Very interested, too, to see that someone has installed a beehive in the garden. 

Elaine, just in today from a couple of weeks in Canada, has brought back a honeycomb from Doug and Margot Miller’s 100–acre property north of Toronto, where they now have around 40 hives.

The picture of the plastic draughts board comes from Walton Hall, near Stratford-upon-Avon, where I had headed yesterday evening, to speak at a National Grid sustainability event. Very nice crowd, though I almost stumbled with my first presentation using Apple’s Keynote software – couldn’t make it work properly on screen, despite it having worked earlier, so headed back to my room to rewrite the thing in PowerPoint. Today, Alejandro (Litovsky) used perseverance and trial-and-error to work out what I should have done. Simple, as it turned out.

One slight surprise: Juliana Grando of National Grid had brought along the slideshow and notes from a course she was taught at university which specifically covered my “thought and work”. Rather an odd feeling to be taught in this way, but rather cheering, too.

Caroline’s studio (detail)

Drove across to Little Rissington yesterday, the countryside looking absolutely ravishing in the autumnal sun, with blue skies and red kites and gliders soaring as I headed through the Chilterns gap. Listening to The Beatles’ Love album, with ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ playing as I slip off the A40 and down what the girls call “The Rabbit Hole” towards Burford, beautifully lit by the slanting sun.

Passed a very recent crash in the notorious dip between Burford and Stow-on-the-Wold, pick up double cream at the Co-op at the old RAF station on the top of the hill, before descending into Little Rissington, the trees and landscape wonderfully illuminated. A big hole in the day: Sam (Lakha), who was meant to come, but had to cry off at the last moment because of back problems.

Late in the day, I filmed Pat and Tim with my Leica D-Lux 4, the first time I have used it in this way. The quality of the images and the sound is extraordinary. They both get into the spirit, remembering how they first met at Castle Gogar, outside Edinburgh, and recount the early days of their marriage, including Mill Cottage, where I was born. Apparently, the reason Tim went across to Gogar from the nearby RAF base, which he commanded at the time, was to negotiate the use of some prisoners of war to clear barbed wire from a nearby quarry, apparently.  

We cycled from barbed wire to cheese wire, with Caroline saying how as a child she and a neighbour, Brian Lane, had tried to work out how they could decapitate members of the local fox hunt with wire suspended across the road. Brian had a pet fox, which Tim had found in our garden – and Brian’s mother, Mary, had once stood in the gap between their house and the next armed with a broom, batting away fox-hounds that tried to get through to Brian’s pet.

Caroline was teaching Marina to paint, so I spent a little time up in her studio, where, as ever, I was taken by her collection of found objects. Wonderful meals – and I came away with a trio of freshly-picked corncobs, huge tomatoes from the greenhouse, and some of Caroline’s squash from her cache in the barn.

As I came out to drive home, a brilliant Moon was hanging over Bobble Hill – and both Mars and Venus were prominent in the star-studded sky. A very easy drive home, with the Moon a constant companion, and small mammals darting across the road in the headlights.

Speaking to Caroline this morning, she reported that Hill House had seemed very quiet when she awoke this morning. She thought Tim must be out in one of the gardens, but then realised that he must be further afield, because “he emanates” – and she couldn’t detect the emanations. Indeed he does. In fact he had been driven off to yet another Battle of Britain signing ceremony.

She and I also discussed our conversation yesterday about who we we would resurrect if he had godly powers. Talking it through with Pat too, we all concluded that top of the list would be Tim’s mother Isabel. She emanated, too. What an extraordinary woman she was – and how I wish I could have an hour or two to fill her in on everything that has happened since she died. One of the things I wish I had recorded on the Leica yesterday was the story of how she had watched him being shot down over Chichester Harbour through her second husband Carey’s Navy binoculars.

Elaine still in Canada, so am listening to music through headphones as I work away today, at the moment it’s The Velvet Underground and their extraordinary track, ‘Beginning to See the Light’, which is part of the loop we have been playing in the office this past week. And, in a way, I think I am.

Studio (detail, 2) Studio (detail, 3)

One of the nicest things about the evening I have just spent with Gaia and Hania at Livebait, apart from the sustainably caught seafood, which was exquisite, was their comment that they had both picked people to work with and for who share a characteristic they associate with me: playful. Would be happy with that as an epitaph.

But walking around Covent Garden, both before and after, as I had with Sam earlier in the week when we were out buying artist’s canvases to serve as pinboards at Volans, I was struck by how much my working life has insulated me from the urban life all around. Must work to rectify.  The Velvet Underground are playing in my headphones, ‘That’s the Story of My Life’.