Search Results for: Tim elkington

Arriving in Mexico City

Hotel Camino Real 1 Hotel Camino Real 2 Camino Real flowers

Even though it is overcast, and inclined to toss down buckets of rain several times a day, among the first things to strike me about Mexico City was the colour. And the interminable queue to get through immigration, though I was met by a charming young woman and driven into the city. And the bad roads.

Sampling Bruno Loubet again, in King’s Cross

Livening up King’s Cross

Elaine, Gaia, Hania and I had lunch today at Bernard Loubet’s new restaurant, The Grain Store, in King’s Cross. Glorious food and, because we were serendipitously able to celebrate our fortieth wedding anniversary, I also ordered a bottle of Nyetimber ‘champagne,’ grown in West Sussex. Extraordinarily good–one of the very, very few good things I can think of to say about climate change.

A day of rampant cabbages and Peacock butterflies

Tim and Pat Cabbage in the garden behind the barn Pat contemplates the beans One of Caroline’s cron cobs served for supper A bowl of cherry tomatoes

A day in Little Rissington, with much of the family. Elaine saw the buddleia bush completely covered in peacock butterflies, which was encouraging. We drove back to London very late, with a huge haul of vegetables from the garden. Joyous.

90 and still up in the air

Tim in back seat of spotter plane Little Rissington from the air

Shortly after his 90th birthday, my father Tim has been up there again – this time doodling around the landscape at 80mph in the same sort of spotter plane that he was en route to fly over the planned Burma seaborne landings in 1945, but WWII ended when he was only part-way, in Ceylon, I think. And a perfectly horrid job it would have been, too, once again with a very high mortality rate for pilots as they puttered overhead the Japanese. The aircraft he was flown around Little Rissington in had a patched bullet hole in its fuselage, underscoring the point.

Wednesday, it must have been Riyadh

Pre-speakers Paul Hawken’s session Greenovation session, including Paul Hawken, Janine Benyus and Nick Parker Bill Clinton’s session Janine, Mabel and Sally

First time I have been in Saudi Arabia, as it was in Abu Dhabi. Fascinated by the region, but the real opportunity in Riyadh turned out to be time spent with the likes of Paul Hawken of OneSun Solar, Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Guild, Nick Parker of the Cleantech Group, Sally Osberg of the Skoll Foundation and Mabel van Oranje of The Elders. Spent pretty much all the time in the Four Seasons Hotel, doing sessions and meeting people.

Chaired a plenary session with Fadi Ghandour of Aramex, Professor Wu Qing, People’s Deputy at the Beijing People’s Congress, and Magatte Wade of The Tiosanno Tribe. Magic moment when I greeted the audience with Salam alicum – and it seemed that the whole lot of them answered back. That said, it was clear that there remains a fair gap between the Saudis and the incomers on many of these agendas. Striking example was the Greenovation session, where the backdrop to several of those mentioned above was a series of centre-pivot irrigation systems, notorious for quarrying fossil water from aquifers.

Enormously impressive session by Bill Clinton, which had me tweeting energetically (@Volandia), but striking how he sucks the oxygen out of the surroundings. The session that followed his struggled to get airborne, with a constant flashing of cameras from behind the scenes where he was being feted. A bit like the electrical storm that flashed through last night, the rain still crashing down as I headed out to the airport today with a nice driver from Syria.