Search Results for: Tim elkington

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.

Another interview, this time with Mary Ziegler of Aviva Investors. One quote: “Changes are harder to achieve when you have a fragmenting political landscape.”

My article on the changing boardroom change agenda appears in the latest issue of ONE Magazine. Here’s the piece. 30 years after I commissioned Financial Times cartoonist Ingram Pinn to draw it for me, my boardroom cartoon – featuring the fish in a pinstriped suit, a poor woman and a robot – is getting a fair amount of airtime again.

This week saw us properly back in the office, Somerset House, for the first time in a very long time. On Tuesday. I was also meant to go in yesterday, Thursday, but had too many Zoom calls already booked – and had managed to give myself blisters by wearing new shoes on a hot day and walking back and forth across London to pick up a new suit.

Plants back in place in the office, which greens the space up nicely. But the rhythm of online events and calls continues unabated. This week, for example, my virtual gigs have included two with the Vibe Summit, on Monday evening for (EU and North America) and on Tuesday morning (APAC). Also zoomed into the latest meeting of the Royal Household Environmental Steering Committee, affording a somewhat different set of lenses on reality.

Very much enjoyed an event with The League of Intrapreneurs, as part of Global Intrepreneur Week. Founded by my old colleague and friend, Maggie De Pree, the League had asked us to do a couple of sessions this week. Mine saw me in the chair of a session on Biomimicry and Regeneration, featuring another long-standing colleague and friend, Beth Rattner (ED, Biomimicry Institute), Diana Yousef (founder & CEO, change:WATER Labs) and Ido Sella (founder & CEO, Econcrete).

It went exceeding well, by all accounts. As did yesterday’s session for the Positive Fashion Forum, with Rachel Arthur of FashMash in the chair and Valerie Keller of Imagine and I discussing the need for transformational leadership and collective action. Important issues raised, but we concluded that this the transformation is only going to work if it’s fun, at least some of the time. And this was.