Wonderful day spent at Ernst & Young’s South Bank offices, cheek-by-jowl with the GLA head-shaped haunt of London’s new Mayor, Boris Johnson, and overlooking both HMS Belfast, the forbiddingTraitor’s Gate entrance to the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. Could watch the changing moods of the water and skies all day, alongside the constant shuttle of vessels of all sizes and purposes, but we were intensively involved in the World Energy Council project as the ongoing story of the inner London Thames unfurled around us.
Journal
ENDS & beginings
Deep, vexing irony today in that I was meant to attend (as a co-founder) a 30th anniversary celebration at the House of Lords this evening for Environmental Data Services (ENDS), hosted by Michael Heseltine, whose company bought ENDS a while back. But because we are in the midst of setting up a new venture, Volans, we have been hugely distracted – and found late today that we have been running parallel calendars, so I was double-booked.
Everyone had left ENDS by the time we discovered the problem, so I had to decide which fork in the road to take. Unusually, I took the family fork, for dinner at Livebait in Covent Garden with Elaine, Gaia, Hania and Elaine’s sister Christine. G and H had invited us to share some quite extraordinary news about their collaborative film script-writing. More anon, when it’s public.
In the meantime, even if remotely, my very best wishes to the ENDS team, particularly David Layton, the late great Max Nicholson and Georgina McAughtry – and in memory of the late, magnificent Marek Mayer.
Sarah Dodds
A heavenly cycle ride in to the office this morning, with open blue skies and the traffic moderately well behaved, but then heard the news about Sarah Dodds, Director of UnLtd Ventures, who has died after falling into a coma following a cycle accident in northern France. A wonderful tribute by Rod Schwartz can be found on the Catalyst Social Business Blog. I last saw Sarah at the Skoll World Forum, then later on the day the Forum closed at an Ashoka event in London, where she went out of her way to introduce me to an American she felt could help us with Volans. She and I were due to meet in the next couple of weeks, something I looked forward to hugely. Her energy and generosity of spirit were remarkable. A truism to say she will be sorely missed, but true nonetheless.
Skyscapes
Homo volans 1
Now that I’m once again thinking of things taking flight, thanks to the derivation of the first part of our still-evolving Volans Ventures, I am tending to see flight-linkages everywhere I go. Today, as I cycled alongside the Serpentine, I came across the preparations for the second Red Bull Flugtag. Chatted to a couple of the teams, including those sticking a load of white feathers onto their swanmobile.
Subsequent note: The Cullinan Bird, designed and built by a team of engineers and architects from London, wowed the crowd with the longest flight of the day, soaring for over 39m before landing in the Serpentine. No idea where the swan placed. But the Red Bull Flugtag competition isn’t all about distance and the Cullinan Bird team apparently failed to impress the judges with their pre-flight performance, resulting in a 5th place finish. Intriguingly, given my interest in the potential of Homo volans in all sorts of areas of innovation and enterprise, the competition was judged both on distance flown and on the level of creativity.