Journal

Spent a wonderful week with the BMW Foundation at Paretz, near Berlin. On that, more shortly. But was thinking while there that BMW, back in the day, had produced BMW 801 engines for e.g. the Focke-Wulf Bf-190 fighter that pilots like my father Tim would have faced in WWII. The most produced radial aero engine of the Third Reich period.

Then this evening I watched Jacqui Farnham’s Channel 5 programme Rolls-Royce: Dream Machines, which I had recorded while travelling. And discovered something I had never heard before.

That was that Henry Royce had moved to West Wittering – and at one point sketched out in the beach sand an early design for the R series engine, which powered Britain’s successful Schneider Trophy contender, and would later evolve into the famous Merlin engine …

… Which powered e.g. the Hawker Hurricane.

… One of which Tim was flying when he was shot down in 1940.

… At West Wittering.

When I got back from Berlin today, Elaine and I went across to Westminster City Hall for the WWF trailing of the forthcoming ‘Our Planet‘ series with Netflix and Silverback.

Great presentations from the likes of Sir David Attenborough, who is becoming steadily more activist, and Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Met and talked to a wide spectrum of people in the field before the showing, including Stanley Johnson (whose son Jo resigned from the Government today, apparently over Brexit, which he sees as a complete cock-up), then went across to the Cinnamon Club for a delightful dinner with Clare Kerr (who I got to know during our joint time as members of WWF UK’s Council of Ambassadors) and her husband, Nick Hurd.

Quite liked this photo of me prowling around in “nature” during the Paretz meeting, though I’m not completely sure I look persuaded that this is Nature as she should be. Meanwhile, my GreenBiz blog on the adventure has now been reposted by the BMW Foundation.

Flew to Germany on Monday, initially to Berlin for a session at the BMW Foundation Hebert Quandt HQ, featuring a beamed-in Jeremy Rifkin, then on by coach to the intriguing and once-royal village of Paretz. Spent several thought-provoking days with some 30 BMW Foundation and (the impact investment network) Toniic invitees – with some thoughts provoked captured in my latest GreenBiz column.

Here is a poem my sister Caroline composed recently, capturing elements of the adventures of looking after our elderly parents – he teetering on the edge of 98 in December, she 96. I can only say I love it. Its acute observation of two extraordinary beings and its patience and stamina in the face of life’s adversities.

The Year of Looking After Mum

In the half-light from the Anglepoise
she is a Limavady beach back in the fifties,
the pillow curving in sand-dune folds around her silver hair,
a beached and bleached mermaid – legs as useless.

This bedroom where you and he have slept and laughed and loved.
The wedding dresses twirled, the hair bedecked,
bridesmaids fluttering like cabbage whites over the brassica.
The mystery of the missing Doll’s House, solved.
The First Man on the Moon in shuddering black and white
on a grey plastic television, which creaked and pulsed with heat;
all six of us in your seven-acre bed.
The carpet, once fluffy vanilla clouds,
now matted and reeking like a damp Labrador.
The resident ghost appearing and disappearing here, in delusion and reality,
came to stay for good when the imaginary became your life.
Hallucinations so real you could reach through the shimmering portal
and pinch their warmly yielding flesh.
Your sightless eyes following apparitions in some other parallel bedroom
where all the abandoned little boys in the world had ample chocolate
and the floor was flooded to your ankles, a rippling High Spring Tide
that wasn’t there.
Where nothing was real except my father.
Now it’s full of fading light and holding on.
Every dent and scratch on ancient walls have history.
Every mark, careless graffiti, left behind in war and peace.
What matters is the minute.
Nothing else.

She says he loved her in an instant,
although she was wearing a stained apron, a dirty tea towel in her hand.
I think I love you, he said.
Don’t be silly, she replied.
But he was right.
The next day he came back with two new tea towels – post-war gold dust.
He had a girlfriend called Misty – she went back to America.
Mum was sad for her.

Caroline Elkington, Little Rissington, 2018