Search Results for: Tim elkington

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’.)

Spent the day at the Royal Geographical Society, first for an off-the-record meeting of Virgin Aeronauts, where Jochen Zeitz and I did a well received session, all the time under the gaze of Captain Scott, the ill-fated Antarctic explorer. Then, in the afternoon, we moved across to a 500-person event on the theme The Next Decade of Good Disruptions. Met lots of people I knew – and a fair few I didn’t, always welcome. Key inputs from Johan Rockström and Jeremy Rifkin.

Ever since I was small, I have been fascinated by military history, from the Crusades (something that began when we were in Cyprus and Israel in the 1950s), through the religious wars in Europe (where my interest began in Northern Ireland, again in the 1950s, and continued at Bryanston, where at times I created my own history course on religious and civil wars) and then the World Wars in which various family members had been embroiled, including my namesake John Elkington, the extraordinary Lieutenant Colonel whose dire misfortunes in 1916 are chronicled here, and after whom I was named.

At the same time, particularly since I was doing my M.Phil in city planning at UCL in the early 1970s, I have been fascinated by the collision and integration of old and new styles of building. Indeed, this was a key theme on my thesis, which landed me in much trouble when it came to the final assessment – the underlying message being at total odds with the approach of Lord Llewelyn Davies, who bestrode the institution at the time.

All of which made a couple of images in today’s Financial Times jump off the page. They showed details of Daniel Libeskind’s extension for the Military History Museum in Dresden, illustrating a piece by Marcus Binney.

Flew in from Seoul to Heathrow, picked up Elaine, and thence more or less immediately on to Oslo, for one of the most glorious sojourns of my life. On the menu, a Festschrift conference to celebrate Jørgen Randers‘ 70th birthday, and his many contributions, kicking off with Limits to Growth back in 1972, and then a more personal trip out to Arøy, the island where he has a summer home. The conference picked up our Breakthrough Decade theme. But, first, some images, to give a flavour of the thing:

This was the first Festschrift I had taken part in, but if this is what we can expect from such things, I can’t wait for the next one. Several hundred people came together at the Oslo-based business school BI, where Jørgen was president from 1981 to 1989. Having contributed to both Jørgen’s amazing book 2052 (my essay was on the future of the military out to the 2050s) and to the Festschrift book, Science Based Activism (edited by Per Espen Stoknes, also author of What We Think Of When We Try Not To Think About Global Warming, and Kjell Eliassen), I was asked to help kick off the event.

What a privilege to help celebrate someone who has been one of the great presences in this field of ours since I was beginning my M.Phil. at UCL back in 1972.

At the start of my presentation, I mentioned that Elaine and I had decided to give Jørgen 2,052 eels, to be released later in the year by the Sustainable Eel Group. Just as Jørgen has spread memes around the world, the idea is that the eels will go out into the wider world and proliferate – which, given the 99% collapse in European eel populations since I had my fateful encounter in the 1950s, is devoutly to be desired. Andrew Kerr had explored for us the possibility of taking eels to Norway for release, but EU regulations (no count sensibly) make that impossible. So the release will be here.

The themes and order of the day can be found here. It was fascinating to hear both people I already knew, among them Paul Gilding and Mathis Wackernagel, and people I hadn’t yet met – not least John Sterman, who is the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management, and current director of the MIT System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His presentation of their interactive online platform, Climate Interactive, blew my socks off.

Later in the day, there was a memorable dinner celebrating Jørgen’s 70th birthday, where it was wonderful to hear speeches from people who have known him for many decades – including our old friend Jan-Olaf Willums. Then, as the the carriages threatened to turn into pumpkins, we caught a coach back to the Radisson Blu across the road from BI. After a night of intense dreams, at least in my case, a smaller group of us (13 of us in total) took 3 cars several hours south to the small island of Arøy, to stay a couple of days with Jørgen and his wife Marie.

On the first full day, and I really can’t say why, particularly when I knew the water was somewhere around a bone-cracking 10-11 degrees, and when you could see a fair few jellyfish floating around, I decided to go for a swim.

The truth is that if Paul (Gilding) hadn’t been there with his camera egging me on, I might have thought better of it. As it was, I plunged in and instantaneously regretted it. Still, as my blood supply struggled to find any molecules with even a modicum of anti-freeze properties, I rolled on my back and swam a little way out, as if I knew what I was doing. Then, as soon as I decently could, I swam back to shore and hauled my way up the seaweed-coated steps.

Later in the day Per Espen went in, and the following day, claiming he couldn’t be left standing by a youngster like me, Jørgen went in too. I’m pleased to have taken the plunge, but secretly thrilled that I don’t have to do it every day. On balance, I preferred sitting on the dock and watching swallows, a heron, terns, geese, oystercatchers and eider ducks doing what they do.

 

The island sojourn was a wonderful chance to catch up with people like Mathis (Wackernagel) and Susan (Burns) of the Global Footprint Network, whose work I have long admired, Paul and Michelle Gilding, and Jørgen and his wife Marie, alongside people I hadn’t met met face-to-face, like Per Espen. A mix of fireside conversations, walks in a form of wilderness, and leisurely meals in the open, either in the sun or, at night, wrapped in blankets under the stars. As Mathis put it, “heaven on Earth.”

Then yesterday, Sunday, Per Espen drove Elaine, Nigel (Lake) and I back to the Randers home in Oslo. Later on, Jørgen arrived back with Mathis, Susan, John and Cindy – and, critically, several bowlsful of Greenland shrimp, plus mayonnaise and slices of a round loaf, on which concoctions of immeasurable delight (and no doubt massive ecological footprints) were duly assembled. I can’t remember when I have enjoyed myself so much, though by the time we got back home, a week after leaving for Seoul, I was ready to sleep forever.