Journal

Quantum eye

In an era where TV seems to be doing its very best to prove the old adage, X channels and nothing on, we have been resorting to watching DVDs: Quantum of Solace, where the addition of an ‘e’ turns a Green into a villain, In Bruges, which seemed to lose a bit of momentum, but then took off towards the end, and Shine a Light, Scorsese’s film of The Stones in concert, where the highlight–for me at least–was the duet between Jagger and Christina Aguilar.

Have also been reading Caroline Murphy’s Isabella de’ Medici–slow to build, but her father Cosimo comes across as strikingly modern and liberal in some ways, at least by the standards of the time, and she seems to have been quite a handful. In the spirit of spring-cleaning, have also been moving cart-loads of books into the rooms that our painter, Andy, has repainted. Makes me realise just how behind I have got in reading the books I buy.  

Otherwise, have been catching up with email, doing email interviews, catching up with old paperwork and beginning to think through upcoming presentations in Paris and New York.  The weather is typical Bank Holiday fare, overcast and too cool to sit out in the garden.  But the birds are wonderfully lively and various plants and shrubs are teetering on the edge of bursting into flower.

An interesting New York Times op-ed on the work of British economist Frederick Soddy on ecological economics can be found here.  Peter Kinder sent the link to John Fullerton, who came in to see us at Bloomsbury Place this week, and myself.  Would be wonderful if the twenty-first century could embrace this sort of uncommon sense.

RAF Museum photo of Spitfire

The Times today tells the story of how eye injuries suffered by Battle of Britain pilots, when fragments of their Perspex canopies embedded themselves in their eyes proved surprisingly inert, gave Sir Harold Ridley the idea of implanting plastic lenses in replacement of cataract-clouded lenses.  As a recent beneficiary of this technology, I can only say another thank you to all those involved.

Here is the Nexus mapping of my Facebook friends, which I find quite fascinating:

http://nexus.ludios.net/view/John_Elkington/NKchv0kJ8j5X/?dark=1

Elaine’s picture of a heron today

This evening, as I was cycling through Hyde Park, just by the Serpentine, a fellow cyclist asked to borrow my pump, because his back tyre was flat.  We talked while he pumped, then I got back on and was just beginning to pedal uphill when an enormous heron flapped gently right over my head and then headed north by north-west across the water, against the most radiantly romantic sunset. A truly magic moment, partly because of my long-standing belief in the heron as a personal talisman and partly because the giant heron is one of the animals thought to have inspired the myth of the phoenix.  

Reminded me of the time when I was standing still, on my own, in the garden beyond the barn at Little Rissington, watching flights of swifts and swallows overhead – and then a hawk, a hobby, powered by, clipping my ear-lobe with its wing-tip as it sped on the low part of a power climb towards its prey.

In any event, I took the heron as a sign that conversations we started today at Volans may be headed in the right direction.  And fortuitously, though I didn’t have my camera to hand at the time, Elaine captured another of the birds today on Barnes Pond.