Search Results for: Tim elkington

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.

Last night, while sampling the delights of Chakra, recommended by Tato Bigio of UBQ and booked by Chris, we drank a bottle of Oded Shoseyov’s Bravdo wine, mentioned in the previous entry. And that encouraged us to switch plans and decide on the Dead Sea in the morning.

(My main memory of the Dead Sea from 1959 was flying over it in a Dakota – and, if memory serves, being invited into the cockpit by the pilot to help steer.)

We went the whole hog this time, swimming in blistering sunshine (though the water was surprisingly cold) and enjoying the smooth sandpapering of the black mud. God only knows how many skins the mud I used had helped abrade over the millennia. But a cold beer tasted surprisingly wonderful afterwards.

As we were about to leave, we were asked for a lift by a young Dutch couple, Erik and Kim (who was suffering from early heat stroke), and took them as far as Ben Gurion airport in the rented, air-conditioned Mercedes. Seeing the West Bank wall – or barrier – was a painful reminder of the ongoing tensions that continue to roil this extraordinary land.

Am determined to finish off Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land on flights to and from Delhi next week.

Then, on our way home on the Sunday, we decided to drop off at Chanctonbury Ring. Weirdly, as we climbed up through the hangings towards the top and the South Down Way, I keep having a profound sense of déjà vu. It was only when we reached to very top that it suddenly struck me that I had been here before, some eight years ago, when speaking at nearby Wilton Park.

Here are some images from this time around:

Yesterday, having seen the film Hidden Figures (staggeringly good, profoundly moving) at the Olympic Cinema in Barnes, we wandered across to Barnes Books, where I bought a copy of Lincoln In The Bardo. Anything to distract me from the continuing antics of the weasel in the White House.

Like January, February zoomed past, with a huge amount of work cranking through the Volans realm – all in the context of the rise of new forms of populism, covered in our latest Volans Salon, held on 31 January. Martin Wright, formerly of Forum for the Future, co-hosted an evening with some 25 people from the wider London  ecosystem.

On 2 February Gaia, Paul, Hania, Jake and I celebrated Elaine’s 70th birthday at Brasserie Zédel: a wonderful evening. And a very welcome distraction from the continuing saga of the kitchen floor, where first hot water pipes have forces us to have the floor taken up. Over a month now of being reduced to a concrete floor.

Other highlights of the month included: chairing a Crowd event on our ‘Social X‘ agenda on the 6th; a lunch with Nicolai Tangen of AKO Capital on the 7th, followed by the launch event for the Science Museum’s Robots exhibition; attending the IntelligenceSquared/Nature Conservancy event called ‘Nature, Our Best Climate Technology‘ on the 9th;

On the 10th we drove across to Little Rissington to see the Hill House ecosystem, then back to a blizzard of events. These included meetings with people like Interface VP Erin Meezan, chairing a session at a WWF event on the Government’s Industrial Strategy in the ICAEW Great Hall on the 21st, followed by an Ecosequestration Trust Board meeting across at Imperial College; a Chilean day on the 23rd, with a visit from Angelica Cortes, followed by lunch with Maria Jesús Nilo at the British Museum Great Court restaurant; then Richard Roberts and I did a 2-hour Leaders’ Quest session for senior Cemex executives at the Building Centre on the 24th; and I was back in the ICAEW Great Hall on 1 March to chair another session, this time for the UKSSD (UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development) annual conference.

 

And then we’re in March already, with a Hüman After All party on the evening of the 2nd and a fascinating lunch at the Gilbert Scott restaurant in the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel with Patrick Thomas of Covestro.

Brought my bike and bunch of pictures back home from the office in a taxi on the 3rd. End of an era with the bike, but after six serious accidents since 1974 it’s probably time to hang up my helmet, at least for central London cycling.