Journal

Across to South Cambridgeshire by train to St Neots, Cambridgeshire, with much of the team to visit a regenerative enterprise, Papley Grove Farm. Run by Martin Lines of the Nature-friendly Farming Network. Informative learning journey, with more of the detail on Martin’s work accessible via the link

Across to UCH this morning for an MRI scan, following a recent check-up at Moorfields Eye Hospital which had showed evidence of a recent stroke in one of my eyes. Here the doctor took me through the scans when they were done and processed.

He literally ‘flew’ me through may brain, which was beyond fascinating. When the journey seemed to have stopped I said, ‘Well that looks fine.’ No, he replied. ‘You”ve got a hole in your brain.’ And there it was. A lacune, filled with cerebrospinal fluid. Apparently formed when a stroke cuts off blood supply to part of the brain.

Ah, I thought, that explains all the things that go missing in my head.

Spotted the pillar box cosy on my way home and it nicely caught my mood somewhere between reflection, exuberance and landing on a new moon. When I had said to the doctor that I was reassured that there was so much redundancy hardwired into the human brain, he asked me what job I was in. Told him the truth, but didn’t say I try to get into other people’s brains and rewire them.

Miserable weather for a Coronation, but Elaine and I went across to Richmond this morning: partly to have our ears looked into, partly to escape a local street party featuring karaoke (which was then postponed anyway); partly to get away from the constant hammering as our roof is stripped and renewed; partly to visit bookshops (with Elaine buying Michael Frayn’s new book in The Open Book store just as he walked into the shop); and partly to have lunch by the river at Tapas Brindisa.

As we walked out of the restaurant and down to the Thames, a bearskinned band struck up for the first time – and the second tune they played was Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Said thank you to the bandsmen as they walked off sodden to their next gig – and would like to say thank you to Eric Idle for writing such a quintessentially English song.

The Volans team clambered aboard two of (Sir) Tim Smit’s time machines this week: The Lost Gardens of Heligan beamed us back into a sustainable version of the past, while The Eden Project transported us into a version of a sustainable future.

Along the way, I found myself pondering what the plural of Tardis might be – linking out to the time machine in the long-running Dr Who TV series. Tardises? Tardes? Tardis? Whatever it may be, these extraordinary places helped put us all in a more elastic timeframe, and reminded us how some people can turn the apparently impossible into the possible and then the inevitable.

And, like Tardis, which is unimaginably bigger on the inside than seems physically possible when the converted police callbox is viewed from the outside, both Eden and Heligan serve as portals to much wider worlds of possibility than you would suspect when viewing their mapped areas.

Ever since Louise, our CEO, took over the reins at Volans, we have put more effort into team-building, in all its forms. Or perhaps I should say she has. This week, the team (including Elaine) spent three days in Cornwall, being taken behind the looking glass at two wonderlands created by our friend (Sir) Tim Smit: Eden and Heligan.

In addition to Tim, we were taken behind the scenes by the likes of Rob Chatwin (Eden’s CEO), Alexandra Dixon (Director of Special Projects, and now driving Eden’s Costa Rican expansion), Jo Elworthy (Director of Integration), Blair Parkin (leading the Pollination program that is co-evolving new Eden ventures in the UK and overseas), Charles Sainsbury (the man charged with ensuring that Eden walks the sustainability talk), and Ramón van der Verde (Heligan’s Managing Director).

We’ll see where all this takes us, but the adventure made me feel even keener to find innovative ways to converge our different worlds.

As a Chief Pollinator, I was also delighted to encounter evidence around Heligan of a couple of small ways I had nudged things along – via introducing Tim to Peter Byck, of Carbon Cowboys fame, and to Annabel Ross, who went on to co-create the Voices of the Lost Gardens exhibits, with wheeled shepherds’ huts used to immerse visitors in the life stories of a range of wild and farmed animals.