Search Results for: Tim elkington

Arrived in Dorset late Sunday, having found the M3 closed between Junctions 2 and 3 and being forced to drive around via Newbury. Staying in Higher Melcombe Manor, where we are greeted by Alfie, the brindled Lurcher. Our host is Michael Woodhouse, who used to be a BA pilot – and who I was sure I had seen at least once on flights hither and thither.

On Monday, across to see our neighbours from Barnes, Stewart and Deborah Lloyd-Jones, who live in nearby Ansty. They take us a daylong tour in their Freelander of this part of Dorset, including a stunning wild garlic/ramson wood near Milton Abbey, Rawlsbury Camp (alongside Bulbarrow Hill), and my longstanding favourite haunt from Bryanston School days, Hambledon Hill.

Atop Hambledon, we sat to admire the surrounding landscapes, me slightly above Elaine and Stewart. Monty, who has been splashing in a nearby mill pond, came and sat beside me, leaning in. Very touching, but dampening.

Then an adventure began, in part of a not entirely welcome sort. We drove out to Chettle with Stewart and Deborah for dinner at the Castleman Hotel. Gin and tonics on the lawn before moving in for the meal, by way of sprawling sofas. A 40-minute drive, but well worth the trip. Only when we got back to Higher Melcombe Manor did I realise I had lost my iPhone somewhere along the way.

Since I had shown Elaine images of Hambledon Hill, I knew it was after that. But no sign in our car or in the Freelander. So on Tuesday morning we drove back to Chettel, to dig into the sofas and enquire whether the phone had been found. No such luck, so we drove back to the manor house.

Then spent a glorious day on the Arne Peninsula, at the RSPB nature reserve, and in nearby Corfe, where we were blown away by the castle, itself blown up after an extended siege by the Parliamentarians. Knew of the Lady Mary Bankes story since history lessons in the early 1960s.

Adored both places – and the had a magical home-made Seville orange marmalade clotted cream and blueberry, lemon and thyme scone tea at the National Trust’s tearooms hard by the main castle gate.

Then back to the manor house, where I let Richard Johnson back at Volans know that the iPhone had gone AWOL. He promptly suggested that I use the ‘Find my iPhone’ service that I thought had been disabled when we rebooted the phone a few days back. What a surprise then to see the satellite search function zooming down, of all places, into Chettle – and what looked very much like the Castleman Hotel.

So back there we drove, for the third time. Then when I switched on my laptop in the reception area, the search function zoomed through the hotel and out into the garden, hovering exactly where we had sat out for drinks the previous evening. And when we went out, we quickly found the phone lying on the grass.

An amazing demonstration of the growing power (and potential intrusiveness, in the wrong hands) of modern technology.

Then, on Wednesday, we trundled off to Salisbury, walking around and through the Cathedral. After Ely Cathedral, this has to be my second favourite in the UK, alongside Westminster Abbey. Wonderful choral practice under way, with the choir master stopping and starting the young choristers, who then repeatedly took off into angelic harmonies. Not my normal sort of music, but mind-bindingly wonderful.

Very struck by William Pye’s font, too, reflecting everything around in deep, still waters, while the overflows tinkled away on either side.

 

Having seen a representation of Old Sarum in the Cathedral when we were looking at the copy of the Magna Carta, I decided on the instant that we should go there – which we promptly did. A stunning site, with its motte and bailey Norman castle dropped into an almost perfectly circular Iron Age fortress.

I had known Old Sarum’s notorious history as a rotten borough from Bryanston days, but had somehow never visited. Joyous.

Then back into the Volvo (which after more than 15 years in the family has only just hit 50,000 miles, suggesting that it is urban sculpture for most of its life) and home, along an M3 which now back in operation.

One of the towering figures in the professional landscape when I started working on environmental issues in the early 1970s was Walt Patterson. Alongside Amory Lovins, at Friends of the Earth, he helped put sustainable energy on the map – in the process denting wider enthusiasm for nuclear power.

Elaine and I took the train to Amersham today for Walt’s 80th birthday party – wonderful turn-out: those shown in the picture were about a third of the attendees at any one time. A great man, a huge influence, and wonderful to be invited to such a gathering of the tribes.

Among those I was able to catch up with were Tom Burke (a previous executive director of Friends of the Earth, and a co-author with me of a couple of books back in the day, The Green Capitalists and Green Pages*), Nigel Haigh (who I worked with in the early 1990s at the Merlin Ecology Fund, when we were part of an advisory board convened by Tessa Tennant) and Richard Macrory (who started my ongoing relationship with Imperial College back in the early 1990s).

Nigel, Tom, Elaine and I travelled back together on the train to Marylebone, comparing notes on the deep history of environmentalism and the sustainable business movement in the UK. One idea we were toying with by the end of the journey was an oral history of environmentalism. I have long wondered about the possibility of creating a real or virtual museum of environmentalism, so this had that beast stirring again at the bottom of the pond.

Took Walt a bottle of Nyetimber English ‘champagne’, which I love. One of the few good things that can be said about climate change in this country.

* Due to be republished later this year by Routledge. When I first heard the suggestion I couldn’t imagine what the book would have to offer in today’s world. But was persuaded by the publishers – and on rereading the book, which includes 50 essays by leading figures at the time – that this was some sort of milestone. It laid out much of the agenda that the sustainability industry has subsequently worked to address.

For 69 years, May 8th has been my parents’ wedding anniversary – and here we are again. Now aged 94 and 96, they are a model to us all on how to manage the long run.

Finished Philip Kerr’s wonderful Prussian Blue novel today. Of the twelve in the series to date, one of the very best. Also bought a number of books this afternoon at Barnes Books, including Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and volume 2 of James Holland’s The War in the West historical series.

And ordered a copy of Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, And The Pace Of Life In Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute. Here’s a note I wrote on his work back in 2011. He visited us at Volans on 8 February last year.

Spent a couple of days in Leverkusen earlier in the week, with members of the Carbon Productivity Consortium, in this case drawn from Volans, SYSTEMIQ and the Future-Fit Foundation. Extremely helpful discussions with Patrick Thomas, Richard Northcote and Markus Steilemann.

Earlier in the week, we did another Salon at Volans, this time co-hosted with Atlas of the Future. Great fun – as demonstrated in this photo taken, I think, by Lisa Goldapple of Atlas.

Otherwise, have been busily responding to feedback on the Harvard Business Review blog and preparing slide decks for Paris, Oslo and Vevey – where I’m headed in the next couple of weeks.

Nice contrast this evening, as the news of Macron’s win in France came in, was to watch the latest programme in the ITV series, The Durrells. Joyous. Only met Gerry Durrell (and his wife Lee, at a private preview of Phil Agland’s film Korup) once, but always adored his writing and attitude to the natural world.

Fascinating few days (24-27 April) in New Delhi with the UN Global Compact, at their Making Global Goals Local Business conference. I moderated a panel session on Breakthrough Innovation and then did a short keynote in the final plenary session on Breakthrough Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals – alongside Zenia Tata of The Prize Foundation and Shaibal Roy of PA Consulting.

A profoundly encouraging response to both sessions – and delightful dinner afterwards with Lise Kingo, who heads the UNGC, before I had to race off to chair a session of the Social Stock Exchange Admissions Panel, by telephone.

Wonderful conversation on the plane back to London with someone who had heard me speak in Delhi and wanted me to speak at a conference of theirs in London in June.

On the flight I finished off Ari Shavit’s stunning book, My Promised Land. Can’t recommend it highly enough for anyone wanting to understand the history of Israel.

Uplifting and depressing in almost equal measure. On page 419, Shavit concludes, “We are a ragtag cast in an epic motion picture whose plot we do not understand and cannot grasp. The scrip writer went mad. The director ran away. The producer went bankrupt. But we are still here, on this biblical set. The camera is still rolling …”

Then a really delightful surprise when I got home. I received an email from British Airways which started as follows:

Congratulations, we’re delighted to let you know that you have earned a lifetime Gold membership from the Executive Club. This means that you will continue to enjoy all of the fantastic benefits of Gold for life.

Blimey! Though I have to say that the immediate delight was quickly tempered by a sense of guilt, in terms of the amount of aircraft emissions and noise generated in the decades of flying I have devoted to the environmental and sustainability causes.

That said, we have offset all flights since way back in SustainAbility days, and also often asked clients to offset the emissions, too, doubling up.

My first flight with BA, at least that I remember, was in 1975, to Cairo – the year after the company was founded through a merger of BOAC and BEA. Well before Air Miles existed, I think. (Checking Wikipedia, it seems they were first introduced in 1992.)

My main memories of that particular trip to Egypt were of the crew lining up at the foot of the gangplank to see us off the plane, and the intense pain I experienced when I lay down to sleep in the Cairo hotel.

It turned out that I had cracked three ribs in a cycle accident in Covent Garden earlier in the day, where I was hit by an Indonesian driver (first day out on British roads) by the Floral Hall. There was a line of hundreds of people waiting outside the Hall to get into a Real Ale event, and not a single person moved to help me as I lay unconscious.

On the upside, I wrote a feature article on the work I had been doing in Egypt for New Scientist, called ‘Beware the Wrath of Osiris‘. Thanks to the magazine’s then Editor, Dr Bernard Dixon, this led on to quite a number of other pieces – which, in turn, led to my being invited by Max Nicholson to help set up Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978. It’s amazing how serendipity sometimes works.