Search Results for: Tim elkington

 

 

Found myself seated in Seat 61, coach 7, on the Eurostar en route to Brussels on Tuesday evening. Was reading iDisrupted by John Straw, who came into see us earlier in the week. Highly readable, recommended – and very relevant to our evolving work on Breakthrough innovation.

That evening, I spoke inside one of the balls of The Atomium, as part of a networking event for baseEUcities, where I’m a member of the advisory board – helping Daniella Abreu develop the EU side of Base Cities.

Had always assumed that The Atomium was just a big sculpture – had no idea there was a museum and conference facilities inside. Originally built in 1958, it was meant to have a short life on the World’s Fair site, but has become a permanent, highly symbolic feature.

Some great conversations around the future of cities, fuelled by some wonderful Italian/Sicilian wines, all of which were organic. I was given a couple of bottles: a 2011 Nafro Sammauro, Cerasuolo di Vittoria, and a 2012 Sgarzon Teroldego. One joy of the Eurostar is that you take acquired-elsewhere wine on board.

But truly grim to see the lines of trucks, extending apparently forever, caused by the migrant problems around the Calais area. This is turning into a tragedy of epic proportions. My sense is that is just the thin end of the wedge.

As climate change gets its claws into Africa and the Middle East, the current trickle of migrants will swell, until millions of people are on the move. Something that those interested in environmental refugees (or, more recently, environmental migrants) have long warned us about.

Interesting to see the Wikipedia entry of environmental migrants starting off with a photo of migrants from Oklahoma in the 1930s. The bad exponentials of environmental disruption can – and will – happen anywhere. The upsides may include ever-better wines grown in England, but the downsides will tax many city mayors to the limit.

Have been ploughing through a stack of books these past three weeks, as I enjoyed my nano-sabbatical – albeit first two weeks were mainly devoted to a massive decluttering of the house we have lived in for 40 years this year. Pace has accelerated since the Augean tasks began to tail off.

This morning, for example, I finished Ghost Fleet, by P.W. Singer and August Cole, which I had first seen reviewed in The Economist. Took a while to order it in from the States via the Barnes Bookshop. Well worth the wait – it’s stunning. Can’t recommend it highly enough, even though Richard Branson goes missing in a balloon part-way through the book.

Among books I have read have been two short, great ones: The Longest Afternoon (about 400 men who it is argued decided the battle through their defence of the farmhouse at La Haye Sainte), by Brendan Simms, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (even better than I first read it in my early teens). Passed the last of these on to Gaia when she delivered the car back after a trip to Norfolk.

Also read Waiting for Godot, in the Faber edition of Samuel Beckett’s Complete Dramatic Works, a gift from Sam. Only book I fell out of, 144 pages in, was The Winds of Dune, by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, but I may well take another crack.

All this reading against the backdrop of wood pigeons tearing into our crab apple tree, though very few of the still-green fruit go into their crops. Most end up on the ground, waiting to be swept into the compost heap.

Have managed a few trips into the city centre, to get new suit(s) and add to the stack of books waiting to be read. Vying for my attention next are Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith, and The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. Then there is The Lady from Prague, by Philip Kerr, and Don Winslow’s The Cartel.

None of them exactly peaceful, though am also toying with several books that are a little less violent, including The Wright Brothers, by David McCulloch,  The Fourth Revolution (on the need to reinvent the state), by John Mickelthwaite and Adrian Wooldridge, Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill and Nikola Tesla’s My Inventions and Other Writings.

Had a nice note from someone this morning who had read Ashlee Vance’s biography on Elon Musk, on my recommendation. The book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is a great read.

We also made it across to Syon Park yesterday, despite the Volvo’s ignition playing up again, and I was fascinated to see the aerial roots of the cypress trees by the water. These, apparently, are so-called “cypress knees.”

One thing that has been making my bad knee suffer in the past week has been getting to grips with my new Rickenbacker 370 12-string guitar, something I have wanted for over 15 years. Reading that the line was being discontinued, I decided to take the jump – particularly when I found one at what seemed like a significant discount. Much room for improvement in my playing, but great fun.

Not sure I welcomed the break when it was first preferred, but it has been wonderful for heart, soul and environmental tidiness. Have no inclination to slow down any time soon, but this has been a reminder of just how regenerative downtime can be. My thanks to the Volans team for holding the fort in my absence.

Wanted to see Simon Pemberton‘s award-winning work in a small exhibition at the V&A, but first trundled across to Regent Street to look for a new suit. Had been disappointed to find that a suit series I have used for years, via Gieves & Hawkes, was no longer available. Didn’t much like the Jaeger styles – and it was Sale time, so problematic anyway.

So we pottered down Saville Row, thinking it might just be time for made-to-measure, but suspecting that it would be too expensive. Then went back into G&H, on a hunch, to find that made-to-measure there would be only slightly more expensive – and that there was a sale of cloth on. So, somewhat accidentally, it looks as if I may be well suited this fall.

Have always been fascinated by good shop window displays in places like New Bond Street – and my eye was particularly caught by a safe in the belly of a gorilla at what point, and then several blocks on, what I recognised as Vought Corsairs in a Patek Philippe window. They also had a fish illustration, which echoed later in the afternoon when we went on to the V&A – and happened upon the Ichthys font by Colin Reid, which is extraordinary.

In the middle, lunch in the restaurant on the top floor of of Waterstone’s, having bought yet more books in the hope of reading at least a few next week. Am part way through several books at the moment, including The Winds of Dune, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson.

Among the books I bought today were Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (which I’m keen to read again), Nicola Tesla’s My Inventions and Other Writings, Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Girl Who Wasn’t There (I enjoyed his earlier book, The Collini Case), Brendan Simms’ The Longest Afternoon, Adam Thorpe’s On Silbury Hill, and Don Winslow’s The Cartel – blurbed as “the War and Peace of dope-war books.” We’ll see.

As a relief from the semi-endless cleaning up of the house, we head across to Kew Gardens for a wander, taking in everything from my favourite mulberry trees (fruit quite some way from ripening) to the piranha in the basement of the Princess of Wales greenhouse.

Schoolchildren everywhere, elbowing their way in to see the deadly fish, though a teacher was explaining that the piranha’s reputation was ill-founded.

Noted that the time capsule in the greenhouse floor (originally Elaine’s suggestion, taken forward by Joss and David Pearson of Gaia Books) has reached its 30th anniversary year. Warmly remember David Attenborough lowering the capsule into the hole, with Gaia and Hania on his knees, both wearing wildly oversize hard hats. And him tapping them on their helmets, asking whether there was anyone in?

I have never minded growing older, but it does seem just a little odd when your younger sisters start to hit their 60s. Still, today’s 60th birthday party for Caroline, and a distinctly lower birthday threshold for family friend (and Caroline’s goddaughter) Marina (de Borchgrave Niblett), was a delight. It spanned the full age spectrum, from babies to quite a few people in their 90s – who tended to cluster in the kitchen, near the Aga.

Due to the number of incoming vehicles, this was first time I had ever used the car park behind St Peter’s Church. Am always reminded as I walk down the path from the church to the village, via a small valley in which a rivulet runs down towards the Dickler or Windrush, that in Black Death days survivors would move a village across the nearest water, because they thought it acted as a barrier to the pestilence.

Scraping all that aside, it has been wonderful to see an array of age-old friends, cousins (Adamsons, Griffins, et al) and joyously assorted others. The cocktail bar in the gifted marquee did a roaring trade, perhaps partly because at one stage some of my nephews and nieces (who were technically in charge) forgot to put in the mixers.

The weather fulfilled Tim’s gloomy forecast of a week or so ago, for heavy rain. But during the party it alternated between hot sunshine and gently spitting rainclouds. Still, the rain that had thumped down on us during our journey westward from London this morning had apparently decided not to get on Caroline’s bad side.

The only thing missing was a fly past from the Red Arrows, which used to be based at the RAF station on the top of the hill behind us – and keep us all amused during their acrobatic training.

Reading the Wikipedia entry flagged a couple of lines above, I was surprised to hear of the rumours of a nearby underground hospital for a post-nuclear situation. Odd, because at one point after he moved on from RAF Little Rissington, Tim had something to do with post-nuclear civil defence in one of his roles. Who knows?

Extraordinary to recall that he was one of the RAF pilots who flew monitoring missions in Avro Shackletons around the British H-bomb test bursts on Christmas Island in the 1950s, in some part of Operation Grapple, when we were living in Northern Ireland. At the time, nuclear Armageddon seemed imminent much of the time.

Given the oasis they have created over the decades since 1959 at Hill House, it’s worth recalling what happened when Tim went off to Christmas Island. He had left Pat in a fairly isolated farmhouse in the Irish countryside, outside Limavady, at a time when the IRA were still fairly active. He had a land line laid, with a hand-cranked handset, in case of emergency. And on one of the first evenings the line went dead.

After a fretful night, a party was sent out to find out what had happened – to find that sheep had chewed through the line where it had been taken through a culvert,

Caroline, tiny then, went on to become an axis mundi (here’s background on that for those who haven’t come across one) for an ever-expanding family and social ecosystem.

So today was a welcome chance for many of us to say thank you to a key member of our tripartite (the other members being Pat and Tim) axis of what, a long time ago, was called Clarke’s Hill Farm House. (Though I’ll probably be corrected on that final ‘e’.)