Journal

Ai Weiwei (in the middle), speaking to Edward McMillan-Scott My smoking main course

Unfortunately, the exact nature of Ai Weiwei’s exhibit in the Turbine Room of the Tate Modern is a state secret – at the request of Unilever CEO Paul Polman – until the event opens on 12 October. But Elaine and I went to the launch this evening – and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the most multi-dimensional, symbolic and interactive of the commissions we have been privileged to see.

Talked to, among others, Ai Weiwei, Paul Polman, Rupert Howes (of the Marine Stewardship Council) and Peter Madden (Forum for the Future), plus a number of other folk. I thanked Ai Weiwei for his extraordinary courage and enterprise in uncovering the number of dead young people after the Sichuan earthquake. Some of the details can be found here.

One of them, Edward McMillan-Scott, a VP at the European Parliament, commented on my surname, wondering whether I was related to Guy Elkington, who had lived in his village? Yes, I said, if he was the Guy Elkington who had had his testicles shot off in WWI. Ah, he said, he hadn’t known about that, but it would account for various things. Among other things, I suspect, the facts that he was consitutionally gumpy and lived with his sisters. I remember quite liking him. More anon on the Ai Weiwei story.

GRI Board pauses for coffee Graffito Elevator moment Clownfish in Indonesian restaurant Shopfront en route back to the Eden Lancaster Canalscape Chess genius Bicycle

Flew to Amsterdam late on Sunday for Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Board meeting. Have just signed on for another three years. Some sadness, with a number of Board members coming to the end of their terms, including John Evans (shown on the right in the first photograph above) and Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace International. But also a very positive outcome, in that we decided to develop a new round (G4) of the GRI reporting guidelines. With the sort of trends spotlighted in our report for GRI, The Transparent Economy, this seems to me the logical next step.

Nightmare moment when I got to the hotel on Sunday evening – and realised that I had left my Mac laptop in the security tray at Heathrow T4. Elaine and Sam helped track down numbers for Lost Property at Heathrow – and Sam called them first thing on Monday, to be told that they had my lost limb in protective care.

Sam then came out to Heathrow this evening, partly to see of her husband Sanjiev and Griff Rhys Jones off to India, where they are filming. But she also trekked across to T3 to get my computer – and reunited me with it almost as soon as I landed. Not sure whether it’s a symptom of ageing or of tiredness, but this sort of thing has been happening rather more often in recent weeks.

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.