Search Results for: Tim elkington

Delighted to see Green Swans out in Korean, with an interview published there this week, for those who read Korean.

Otherwise, life spins along. Did a panel session for the Edison Electric Institute in the USA yesterday, with Angela Wilkinson (Secretary General of the World Energy Council) and Jamie Arbib (founder, RethinkX).

Among other things have a memorial service for Mike Cooper this morning, a former submariner and maritime lawyer who was a long-time friend through our children, followed by a 3-hour meeting of the WWF Council of Ambassadors in Hanover Square and then dinner at the Conduit with Ipshita Mandal-Johnson, CEO of the Global Bio Fund.

Meanwhile, Volans is continuing to attract a good deal of interest – and our small team is growing. We are putting the whole team through John Fullerton’s Regenerative Economics course at the moment, where I’m on the faculty – and more or less all heading off to Mallorca early in May to spend several days with Daniel Christian Wahl.

And I continue to crank along with the interviews of Regenerators for the Green Swans Observatory. Among my favourite recent interviews is the one I did with Dr Christian Busch, author of The Serendipity Mindset and Connecting The Dots. When I get to 20-21, am planning to pull together an overview.

In other news, I have finished a late draft of the new book, and am now looking for a suitable literary agent. A strange feeling coming out the other side of the project, which has a much stronger autobiographical flavour than anything I have done to date. At times it feels a bit like Wile E. Coyote zooming off the cliff edge.

My trip report on our recent trip to Costa Rica can be found here. The third image shows the group we travelled with, including our guide and driver. We were seeing glimpses of a paradise while the Russian invasion turned parts of Ukraine into hell on Earth. Clashing worlds of regeneration (Costa Rica) and degeneration (Russia).

Spoke yesterday at IESE, the Madrid-based business school. An annual event for their 50,000-strong alumni network, this time focusing on sustainability. Some time since I have been to their campus and was impressed by their new complex of buildings, in which the event was housed. Met some great people who I plan to follow up with.

Then today I went walkabout in Madrid. Among the places I visited were CentroCentro (whose exhibitions I found somewhat muddy and disappointing), the Prado Museum (whose collection blew me away) and the Sorolla Museum (ditto).

Looking at the Prado exhibits through the eyes of Asian visitors I was following around at one point, it struck just how much of a death cult Catholicism has been, with assorted martyrdoms including everything from crucifixions, to arrows and rocks.

Pieter Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death was a painful reminder of just how brutish life could be in medieval times. And Goya’s execution images and Black Paintings rubbed the point in for recently modern times.

The religious painter whose work has always leaped out for me – and did so again today – is El Greco. Weird, extruded, exquisite. Plus I liked Flevit Super Ilam by Enrique Simonet Lobado. Plus some of the royal portraits, amid all the assorted thuggery and ugliness, were striking – including the Velasquez renderings of Philippe III and Felipe IV.

But there were real delights in the midst of it all, too, including several Sorolla paintings, with Boys on a Beach particularly eye-catching. I was so taken by them that, having turned away from a long queue outside the Sorolla Museum in the morning (it is only 7 minutes from my hotel), I went back there – to find no queue at all around 16.00, and entry free.

A really joyous place with a stunning collection of his paintings, including the bathing horse and women walking on a beach.

Louise (Kjellerup) Roper and I joined the COP26 Fridays4Future march through Glasgow today, in fairly intense rain at times. Wonderful experience, everyone in good spirits and very friendly. Tremendous drumming. Organisers estimated 100,000 people took part – the striking thing was how it was all age groups, all in this together. As indeed we are.

Don’t do this at home. Elaine and I tried eating yew berries – or at least their golden flesh – this afternoon. But we made REALLY sure to spit out the seeds – even one can be fatal, apparently. Delicious, though.

We were visiting a friend from seriously long ago, namely the early 1970s, when we lived together just off Belgrave Square, in Elizabeth Street. Toby Greenbury and his wife Jennifer. Joyous visit and great walk in their wood/arboretum.

Saw lots of birds, but was very taken by what I think was a wood warbler, the first I have knowingly seen.

Almost certainly this will have been the last longish trip for our Volvo V70, which we have had for well over twenty five years.

The new London ULEZ air quality zone means that it would incur tough daily penalties from the end of the month.

But there’s one thing I won’t miss about the car, much as I have loved it. There’s some sort of energy drain somewhere that means the battery runs down fairly quickly. No-one has been able too find out what or where it is, but the RAC has replaced the battery 3-4 times over recent years.

When I gave a TEDx talk in Glasgow last week, I mentioned the car and the fact that the ULEZ development meant that Elaine and I were planning to do without a car for a while, to see how that goes. Having had car for forty five years now, that’s going to be some sort of Rubicon.