Search Results for: Tim elkington

Can’t explain it, but when we went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens today at the Odeon IMAX in Waterloo, I fell in love with Maz Kanata. I have always said I liked older women: but this must be the first time I have fallen for a 1,000-year-old steampunk smuggler

P.S. I wasn’t aware that Chewbacca was born here in Barnes.

 

 

I can’t even begin to describe the acceleration of events in 2016. Have described it to people coming through the office as a bit like being strapped to a rocket.

A key part of this has been our new 2-year program with the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), but it has also coincided with a range of other projects, including the beginning of a relationship with the new Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development (GCBSD).

Among  milestone moments in recent weeks was a visit with Elaine to the British Museum to see the Celts exhibition, subtitled Art and Identity. Stunning. On the way out, we wandered across to the Rosetta Stone, by far my favourite object in the BM.

With change in the air, we have been transforming bits of 1 Cambridge Road, creating a new study for Elaine in Gaia’s old bedroom. So we trekked across to John Lewis on the 26th to get a desk, chair and light. On the way there, or perhaps back, we passed the Fine Art Society in Bond Street, and on the spur of the moment ducked in to see an exhibition by Bartholomew Beal.

It was love at first sight, at least when it came to an enormous painting of his, The Eldest Have Borne the Most. Couldn’t help myself – bought it, though waited until Gaia and Hania had been to see it, too.

The image, part of a series of paintings based on King Lear, has endless elements that chime with aspects of my life: a eucalyptus-like forest background, very much like stained glass (a long-standing fetish of mine); a central figure very much like John St John, who Elaine worked with at Heinemann decades ago; the Green Man-like crown; the swirling elements being orchestrated (the story of my working life); the magic carpet; the sense of nature being ‘started’ by science and technology, symbolised by the two birds; and so on.

The next day, the 27th, kicked off with a breakfast meeting at Veolia’s HQ, where I chaired a debate for Outstanding (they work with the LGBT community and allies) featuring Unilever chairman Paul Polman. He really is a phenomenon, stunningly impressive. The invitation came via Ori Chandler, who worked with me at SustainAbility, back in the day.

On February 1st, Gaia, Hania, Jake, Pul and I helped celebrate Elaine’s 69th birthday at the Soho restaurant, Quo Vadis. A glorious evening. We were sitting right by the stained glass windows. And it was quiet enough that my tinnitus/hyperacusis problem wasn’t an issue.

Then, among a blizzard of other meetings with people like Cathy Runciman and Oriol Soler of the Atlas of the Future, Solitaire Townsend (to whom I owe the ‘Meerkat Moment’ phrase in a caption above, by which she meant we are at a juncture where a raft of opportunities seem to be coming our way) and Matt Sexton of Futerra, and Thomas Ermacora of Machines Room, it was time for me to take the train south to Folkestone, where Julie Hirigoyen of the UK Green Building Council and I were picked up by a car and driven through Dover to the amazing Pines Calyx conference centre. My session seemed to go very well.

On the way back to the station, the taxi driver (Simon) took me to see the Battle of Britain memorial at Capel-le-Ferne, which I had wanted to see ever since it was opened. Walked around it more of less on my own, and was moved to see Tim’s name on the scroll of honour. Simon’s father, it soon turned out, was a former navigator in a Wellington bomber, so inevitably we talked about Barnes Wallis and geodesic design.

Out of the melée of events in recent days, another that stands out was a breakfast meeting (there seem to be a fair few of these, these days) with UBS’s wealth management people. This followed on from a session I did for them in St Moritz late last year. it looks as thought the conversation will continue.

Then, earlier this evening, and the proximate trigger for this blog, we watched a quite remarkable pair of TV programmes. The first was the second part of Iain Stewart’s How Earth Made Us on BBC4. The first episode had been on seismic fault lines and how civilisation often sprang up alongside them, sometimes with disastrous consequences, as with Thera and Crete.

Interesting to see why Cyprus was an island of copper, and of other mineral resources. This latest episode was on water. All of which put me in mind of learning about hydraulic civilisations while doing Sociology at the University of Essex, back in the 1960s.

The second programme this evening, on Channel 4, was by Tori Herridge – entitled Walking Through Time. Unbelievably interesting – on the science that shows that the White Cliffs of Dover were created by a mega-flood some 450,000 years ago, when a massive glacial lake breached a chalk land-bridge that once connected Britain to the continent.

Uncomfortably topical in the light of the impending vote on whether the UK should stay in the European Union  …

Snow this morning, though it didn’t last. Yesterday we went to see Mr Foote’s Other Leg with Hania, Gaia, Paul and Christine. First act had me fidgeting a bit, but the second was profoundly moving. It’s astounding just how busy London can be on a Saturday.

Otherwise last week was something of a scramble. That said, I keep finding myself saying to people that I feel like Sisyphus on a good day. For several years, it seems, we have been pushing not just a rock uphill, but rubble. But now, suddenly, it feels as if the rubble is coming together into a rock, which appears to be cresting some sort of rise.

The week involved meetings with the likes of GlobeScan (Chris Coulter), Generation (Colin le Duc), Futerra (mainly Ed Gillespie and Soli Townsend) and The Crowd (with Jim Woods and 6-7 of his team coming to lunch). Great teleconferences with the UN Global Compact and, on related themes, with the Business for Peace Foundation in Oslo.

More anon, but we are in the process of building an ‘Exponential Sustainability’ consortium. So far the  responses have been extremely positive. Over the weekend, I have also been sending out the first wave of invitations to some fairly iconic people in the field, with requests that they join us in the endeavour. Some have already said yes.

On Friday, I went across to Somerset House and the Courtauld Institute with Elaine to see the Tintin exhibition, which was small (three rooms) but reminded me of just how much I loved Hergé’s books and design as a child. Then across to a nearby travel surgery to get a belated flu injection, ahead of what looks like a fairly travel-intensive year.

Holiday reading spree has continued, to a degree, including finishing off today both Tom Mitchell’s utterly delightful The Penguin Lessons and When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow, by Dan Rhodes. At times, the latter was laugh-out-loud, though perhaps it’s no accident that Rhodes’ first entry in his Acknowledgements refers to Gilbert & Sullivan.

The diagram above, from Ray Kurzweil’s work on what he dubs the impending Singularity (a concept that he dates back at least to the work of John von Neumann in the 1950s), is on an exponential scale (the vertical axis) and shows writing turning up relatively late in the story. Thank heavens it did. My appetite for books, magazines and newspapers remains virtually unquenchable.

During the last couple of months the piles of books I have bought have also risen near-exponentially, whereas my ability to read them has been compromised by the pace of work, except those I could take on planes. Happily, however, the holiday period has broken the logjam.

The first book I roared through was Jonathan Dimbleby’s extraordinary The Battle of the Atlantic. One of the most memorably storylines was the pursuit of FDR by winston Churchill, with Dimbleby describing FDR as playing the role of the “artful dodger” when it came to involving the United States directly in the war.

But on the same page there was a footnote mentioning that there Atlantic Charter that the two statesmen signed aboard the Prince of Wales in Placentia Bay in 1941 would become the blueprint for 1945’s UN founding Charter. Given our impending work with the UN Global Compact, I found this particularly interesting.

Shortly afterwards, I read Carlo Rovelli’s beautifully written Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. The book’s ‘In Closing’ section is remarkable for its brief consideration of whether our species will long survive the consequences of its environmental depredations.

“I believe that our species will not last long,” says Rovelli, chiming with Lord Martin Rees, who kindly gave me a signed copy of his 2003 book Our Final Century earlier in the year when we met in Bristol.

Interestingly, though, Rovelli concludes that “There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns.” They are, he says, “in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes.”

And it is around the last of these that much of my recent reading has revolved. A couple of days back a couple of Amazon packages arrived, one containing Ray Kurzweil’s wonderfully provocative book The Singularity Is Near, which I have now read much of.

An earlier package had disgorged a new copy of Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail (to replace the copy I left on a plane and the Kindle version which I found virtually unreadable), A History of the Future in 100 Objects by Adrian Hon, Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation by Tony Seba, and James Barrat’s Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.

All of this is building towards our 2016-17 work theme, of which more later.

In between times, I have also been churning through faster books, because they are page turners (like Simon Scarrow’s Britannia), because I can flip through the images (the 2-volume Taschen collection of Salvador Dalí’s work which I bought in Ely earlier in the year, or because they are shorter (as are the short stories in The Book of Gaza, published by the wonderfully named Comma Press).

In any event, I seem to have got back my reading mojo.

For reasons that will become clearer in 2016, the final couple of weeks of 2015 included a gathering tempo of system change sessions, with key ones in London (on 9 December, which Volans co-hosted with the Academy of Systemic Change) and Amsterdam (on 11 December, where I was part of embryonic conversations around a new system change platform).

More anon, but there’s a new spirit abroad, particularly in the wake of the apparently successful outcome of the COP21 climate summit, which several of the Amsterdam participants had taken part in. The Amsterdam session was hosted by the THNK School of Creative Leadership and Innovation, which I am really keen to get to know better.

Fascinating ride in from the airport early in the morning (had to get up around 04.20 to get there in time), with a driver in a white Tesla who looked like a university lecturer, or a taller version of Lester Brown, and who promptly have me (with no signal from me on what my interests were) a lecture on sustainability.

Among those he flagged as leading champions was Thomas Rau, who he had recently seen in a TV documentary. Once I revealed my colours, we had a very energetic discussion, and exchanged cards. Later in the day I sent a note to Thomas’s wife, Sabine, to say he seemed to be virtually ubiquitous.

I can’t remember which weird American book it was in which I read that as a major change approaches the number of apparent coincidences goes off the scale, though I think it was probably The Celestine Prophecy, but that’s what I’m experiencing at the moment.