Search Results for: Tim elkington

What a joy to be able to identify plants as we walked across Barnes Common yesterday. I have had the PictureThis app on my iPhone for well over a year, but it really came into its own as we walked around Mill Hill and back.

Alongside relatively common plants like Comfrey, Gorse, Scottish broom, Sheep sorrel, Ribwort plantain, Hedge mustard, Wall barley, Greater Celandine and Star of Bethlehem, we came across Sicilian honey garlic for the first time. The latter’s leaves tasted as advertised.

The richness of plant names was illustrated by the Star of Bethlehem, aka as Garden star-of-Bethlehem, Sleepydick, Nap-at-noon, Grass lily, Summer snowflake, Snowdrop, Starflower, Bird’s milk, Chinkerichee, Ten-o’clock lady, Eleven-o’clock lady, Bath asparagus, and star of Hungary. And Dove’s dung.

I’d be rather less inclined to taste Ripgut brome which we saw on the Common or the Hemlock water-dropwort we saw along the banks of Beverley Brook, a plant whose common names include Dead tongue and Dead man’s fingers.

Wonderful sense of walking through a landscape in multiple dimensions. Past, present and future. Plants, insects, birds, and people representing many more nationalities and family trees than might have been the case in the sixteenth century, for example.

Delighted to see my first piece appear in I By IMD, produced by the Swiss business school, IMD.

Have done a number of virtual events in Turkey this year, one rest of which was this profile in Oksijen. My thanks to Melis Alphan. Otherwise I continue to whizz around the world. Today, Earth Day 2021, started out in Japan, then back to London, then United Arab Emirates, then London, then US for the first time, and after coming back to London, off to California for a last call. A new order that would have been clinically impossible before COVID-19 gave virtual presence platforms a shot in the arm.

As part of an exchange with an American relation today, my brother Gray sent a photograph from when I was perhaps 6, or so. It shows my favourite grandmother, Isabel’s, second husband, Carey Coaker. He was a doctor. The place: Bilbao House, Dulverton, Somerset. Apparently, we were watching Gray being mounted on a horse, which explains everything.

When I looked up the house’s name today, I discovered that in 1739 a fire engine and sundry buckets were purchased and stored nearby. Which must have been why “Bellamy”, Carey’s gardener, also shown, was also a fireman.

I remember him wearing a huge brass fireman’s helmet at times – when the great (probably very small by today’s standards) fire engine came racing down the hill. I seem to remember that it was Bellamy’s job to ring the hand-rung bell on the impressive, urgent machine.

I also recall being chastised, beaten, by Carey for the breakages of various jars in his surgery, a crime almost certainly committed by Isabel’s two Siamese cats. But among many happy memories was one of being taken through the walled garden and out through a tiny wooden door at the back, into a green lane.

Later, Carey would run off with a wealthy patient, Phil I think, who we would meet much later – and very much liked. Bellamy would suffer what may have been a heart attack and slump face-down into his flower beds. But that was all in the future when this picture was taken.

I decided to cycle up to Hammersmith Bridge today, closed to all traffic for an eternity, it seems – to blow away some of the holiday cobwebs. Got there and back comfortably, with slushy rain starting to wink in as I got back to Barnes Pond. Then this evening I watched the Dr Who New Year’s Special, Revolution of the Daleks – which featured Daleks, of all places, on Hammersmith Bridge.

Other than that I have been plowing through books – currently immersed in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry of the Future. Very much linked to work I have been doing over the holidays – but more on that later. At times it reads slightly like a novelised version of an MBA course on sustainability, but am enjoying it immensely – and pondering how I can step up my game in 2021.

Have also watched Ken Burns’ 2012 miniseries, The Dust Bowl. Mentioned that to Paul Hawken today and he replied that we are pretty much there again.