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In very late last night, with train services severely disrupted by Storm Ciaran, from Anthropy23 at The Eden Project. A significantly easier ride though, at least for me, than we had with Anthropy22. The Volans team was further augmented, contributing to at least four sessions (Louise’s on leadership, mine on securing peace and sustainability, a Bankers for NetZero event and the launch of Sacha Dench’s film ‘Flight of the Swans‘), along the way we hosted lively dinners in the Rainforest Biome and at the Cornwall Hotel & Spa.

My session ran for an hour on 3rd November, with three panellists: Scilla Elworthy of The Business Plan for Peace, Lt-General Richard Nugee of the Ministry of Defence, and Colonel Rosie Stone, Human Security Advisor at the MOD. Many thanks also to my friend and colleague Thammy Evans, with whom I did a Carnegie Europe paper on the future role of the military in relation to the climate and biodiversity emergencies, for her help in hooking in Rosie.

I worked up a draft summary of the session earlier today and circulated it to our panellists and team members, with an agreed version due to be submitted to the Anthropy team shortly. Also plan to post a summary once we have an agreed version. Part-way through the session I asked the 200-plus strong audience three questions:

1. Who had served in the armed forces? Perhaps a dozen hands went up.
2. Who was working for the defence industry? One or two diffident hands went up.
3. Who thought the theme of our session was relevant for future Anthropy events? Virtually every hand in the huge room shot up.

With the help of team member George Hopkins, we did another series of video appreciations of the event. The first can be found here, the second here. We will be posting summaries and assessments on the Volans website and through various other channels in the coming days. But here are a handful images that capture some of my own experience of this latest iteration of an extraordinary event.

Heartfelt congratulations to Anthropy founder John O’Brien and his team.

On our penultimate day in Jordan, we visited the Citadel and the Roman Theatre, alongside their museums. We were also steered around the old quarters of the city by Iain Stewart, who I first came across via his BBC series on geology and by speaking at a virtual conference on mining and minerals he chaired for Britain’s Natural History Museum. he now holds the Jordan-UK El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society.

Iain and his wife, Paola, took us under their wing, among other things steering us uphill to Amman’s Rainbow Street and then on to Trinitae’s Soap House. Fabulous scents and soaps. Inadvertently, we were slightly late back for the last supper with our Exodus group, but it seemed to go down without too much of a storm.

Overall, I couldn’t recommend the Exodus 12-day tour of Jordan more warmly. There were occasional glitches, of course, with the Gaza horrors raging in the background, but the trip more than satisfied the desire to visit the country that ignited when my original nuclear family went briefly across the border with Israel back in 1959, when I was nine and we were living in Cyprus.

Without being greedy, I can’t wait to go again.

Much of the conversation at breakfast was about the sound the jet fighters throughout the night, but a number of us made our way to a view point in the valley beneath the camp where we could watch the sun rise. Delightful to watch the light catch the peaks of the mountains behind us, then work its way down their flanks and out across the valley.

En route to the viewing point, we spotted what looked like – and almost certainly were – gerbil burrows. A camp cat following the group made a point of showing us how he hunted gerbils – and how he controlled the landscape. Quite a remarkable creature.

Observant readers of these entries will have spotted that there are few people shown here – and little or no litter, though the landscape is often filled with both. Artistic license, I’m afraid. As a gesture, I started to pick up some litter on the way back to our camp. Finding a pair of pink children’s trousers, I gingerly lifted them up and, sure enough, three dead beetles and a scorpion fell out.

Then it was off to Aqaba, with a stop along the way to take a look at a Turkish locomotive that harked back to the time during the Arab Revolt when Lawrence helped direct attacks on the Hejaz railway running to Aqaba.

Once in Aqaba, we stayed three hours in a beach resort while some swam in the sea and pools, and we lounged on a pair of loungers in a shady spot and pondered what we have seen and experienced on this trip – all to the sound of an insistent Arab disco beat. I like music, but …

We spent today finding our way around the wonder of the world that is Petra. Walking though the wadi early in the morning, before too many people were about, was like being in – or perhaps induced – a state of grace. My interest in the Nabataean people and culture was ignited well before the sun blazed over the canyon rim high above our heads.

I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, but delighted we have another day tomorrow to explore further. The day ended with a dinner with a local Jordanian family, thanks to Exodus, with children buzzing all around, plastic grass in the sitting area, a tinkling electric fountain and an insect destroying UV set-up that every so often would let off a crack like an old-fashioned cap-gun.

We were made wonderfully at home, the food was exquisite, with a hibiscus drink and tea with sage. I had a long conversation with our host, covering everything from arranged marriages, through the influence of TV and cell phones on children, to the evolution of the local tourism industry – from a single hotel when he began work to, by his account, some 60 today.

The site is well managed, though my photographs will give an idea of a less crowded place than is the reality. Among the visitors, guided and independent, buzz electric golf buggies and the occasional SUV convoy, plus horses, strings of donkeys, and a fair few dogs and cats of miscellaneous breeds. But thank heavens that they don’t allow drones.

I had wanted to visit Kerak (aka Al-Karak) Castle ever since reading Ronald Welch’s novel Knight Crusader when I was perhaps 10 or 11, back in the early 1960s. It was hugely sympathetic to the people the Crusaders called Saracens – and had a huge influence on how I viewed both the Crusaders and their enemies, the Seljuk Turks.

Having since read many accounts of the experiences on all sides during that seemingly endless and often bitterly fought conflict, I felt a magnetic pull towards such castles as St Hilarion, which we visited several times while living in Cyprus in the late 1950s, and Syria’s Krak de Chevaliers, which Elaine and I visited in 2002.

Two other other castles I had long since known about turned out to be on the menu today: Kerak, which I largely knew because of the vile activities of Raynald de Châtillon, and Shobak (Qal’at ash-Shawbak in Arabic), which I had known as Montreal – and hadn’t realised until today would be on our itinerary.

De Châtillon has had a bad press since he died – partly because some of the histories were written by his enemies. But he truly was one of history’s villains. Indeed, his perfidy resulted in Salah al-Din having his head struck off after the Crusaders’ disastrous defeat at the Battle of Hattin, an event which features prominently in Knight Crusader.

There were many reasons for my feeling uncomfortable at Kerak today, splendid though its military architecture may be – and I was delighted to get a good shot of the glacis that had struck me when I first saw a photograph of the castle back in the early 1970s. Shobak’s later role as a particularly grim prison no doubt lent an additional edge to the sombre mood, but – after driving another 130-odd kilometres – we found walking around Montreal/Shobak Castle as the sun set a real delight.