Search Results for: Tim elkington

Continuing the theme of trips to different parts of southern England, we headed off to Dover and then Deal on Thursday, to see our Canadian friends Doug and Margot Miller. Doug founded GlobeScan in 1987, the same year we founded SustainAbility. Thirty years ago this year – and we have been fellow travellers pretty much ever since.

We walked along the beach from Deal to Walmer, visiting Walmer Castle, where I had to exit the castle to take an urgent call with Geoff (Lye). A high wind, with dust devils swirling across the gravelled drive alongside. Semi-apocalyptic feel.

Then the four of us walked back for dinner at Whits of Walmer, whose proprietors we knew from the days when they ran Whits in Kensington. Wonderful atmosphere and food in an old smugglers’ inn.

The next day, yesterday, Elaine and I went for the first time to see Dover Castle, expecting to stay a couple of hours – and staying five. Wonderful reconstruction of a royal court in the late 12th century in the Great Tower. Got there at opening time, so visitor numbers allowed a reflective exploration.

Later, we went down in the once-secret tunnels in which Operation Dynamo was planned, the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. As we were waiting to go down into the tunnels, a lone Spitfire growled past. Talking to the guide afterwards, he mentioned meeting one man who had been 17 when he was part of the crew of one of the Little Ships. He came back an old man.

Hope to see Christopher Nolan’s new Dunkirk film, launched this week. That said, it apparently pretty much ignores Ramsay’s role, and many other things. But at least it does help counter the misconception that the RAF went AWOL during the evacuation.

Having gone to prep school at Glencot, near Wookey Hole, I have long been in love with Wells Cathedral – particularly the stairway up to the Chapter House. Wonderful winged sculptures in the Bishop’s Palace Gardens. But sadly a bit too early for the ripe mulberries I remember from a very long time ago.

Yesterday saw the (very) successful completion of our second Basecamp, this one hosted by UBS and focusing on the confluence of money, data and trust. Our hosts were Howard Kemp and Giles Sibbald.

I had worried that we would fail to match the excitement and impact of our Carbon Productivity Basecamp at the RSA on 14 June, but – in slightly different ways – they both worked wonderfully well.

The images above capture the spirit of the latest event. But it’s hard to take images when you’re one of the facilitators, which I was – kicking off with a session featuring three giants in the space: Mark Campanale, Nick Robins and Tessa Tennant. I have known  all three for pushing 30 years – and between them they have helped create many key initiatives in the space.

The previous evening we hosted a dinner for 24 of the participants at Somerset House, in the Drawing Room restaurant. Extremely hot, with London temperatures and humidity pushing all our envelopes. Some  sense of the space can be found here, though we had it arranged with two long tables. Great food – and the energy in the room could have powered a small city.

During the Basecamp, the Atlas of the Future team filmed a series of interviews with selected speakers, who included Mark, Tessa, Nick, UBS Global Chief Economist Paul Donovan, Jamie Arbib and Henrik Olsén of Rethinking Capital, Jeremy Openheim of SYSTEMIQ, Steve Waygood of Aviva, and Sacha Romanovitch of Grant Thornton.

Key content on the event, including edited versions of the filmed interviews, will be published shortly.

After the reception that followed the event, held in one of the UBS atriums overlooking things like a bulldozer being hoisted by a crane into a difficult-to-reach part of a nearby construction site, a group of us went off to have a celebratory dinner.

We stumbled upon The Holy Birds which, as Jacqueline put it, ticked pretty much all my boxes. Great food, including a fondue made with Hoxton Gin, delightful service, a great acoustic environment (because the place was virtually empty apart from us) and a stream of wonderful music from the Sixties (e.g. Cream, Donovan, Stones, Them, Yardbirds). And great conversations, including with Kaye Allen, who joined the Volans team on Monday.

After my final meeting as a member of the Social Stock Exchange board, from which I volunteered to stand down to ensure greater diversity, I headed back to the office for a session with the Carbon Productivity Consortium.

Then Lorraine (Smith) arrived with her mother at the same time as (Professor) Adam Sulkowski turned up. We split a birthday cake between us. Six candles, which meant I was only missing 62.

Adam, of Polish extraction, is probably the only reader of Cannibals With Forks, which he remindeed me was published 20 years ago this year, who knew where the title came from. A Polish poet by the name of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, 1901-1966, who asked the question whether it was progress if cannibals learned to eat with forks?

Adam brought me a copy of A Treasury of Polish Aphorisms, dedicated to the memory of Lec. And one of the aphorisms that immediately caught my eye, particularly in the context of Polish liberation struggles, was this:

Not every boomerang returns.

Some choose freedom.

Then a great Skype call with Jed Emerson in San Francisco, before heading across to Zédel in Piccadilly, for dinner with Elaine and a long-standing friend, Svenja Geissmar, General Counsel at Arsenal Football Club.

First met Svenja many years ago through Fran(cesca) van Dijk, a longtime colleague at SustainAbility – and one of three ‘pod-mates’, in the sense that she, Andrea Spencer-Cooke/Henman and I worked closely together in a small team and all shared the same birthday, even if we are of very different vintages.

At this distance of time, I genuinely can’t recall when I first met Ernst Ligteringen—it could have been this century or the last, in any one of a dozen countries. While trying to find out, I stumbled across this photograph taken during a GRI event in Amsterdam in 2010, but even then I felt I had known Ernst forever.

He was always there, friendly, calm, with a benign sense of humour and uniformly well dressed, quietly holding the centre of the conversation in the interests of the wider world and of the future.

I shared with Ernst a sense that our embrace of the sustainability cause and agenda often came at a cost—to ourselves but, much more importantly, to others. Time that could—should—have been devoted to family and friends was invested in bettering the life chances of others, sometimes geographically remote and sometimes remote in time, including the not-yet-born.

Who really knows where that calling comes from—or what sustains it through the highs and lows of a life spent trying to change the world for the better? But without the loving support of his family it would not have been possible, let alone sustainable.

Like a torch held to others, Ernst sparked deeper awareness and commitment in people from every sector and every corner of the globe. As our mutual friend Bob Massie recalls it, he was a man “who could speak many different languages, both culturally and linguistically, and a leader who could handle a thousand details and relationships without ever losing sight of our long-term goals.”

To say I will miss him is both trite and true. But I am sure I speak for a multitude in saying that something of Ernst—variously son, husband, father, friend and global phenomenon—will burn on in memory and in love.