Search Results for: Tim elkington

First Volans wine-tasting

Tell shoots the tasters Ale in black, Tell skips for joy Amanda, me, Richard Glass-scape

We have resurrected something that we used to do occasionally at SustainAbility: a blind wine-tasting. In the old days, when we are at the Knightsbridge office, we used to do it competitively, with Tell Muenzing (from Germany) championing European wines and Nick Robinson (from New Zealand) New World wines. This time, Tell did it on his own, with four reds and two whites.

Huge fun – and wonderful to look around the room and see colleagues from Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Singapore, UK and US. There’s a new book out, The Last Lingua Franca, by Nicholas Ostler (Allen lane), who argues that the shelf-life of English (or even ‘Globish’) as a global language may well be limited, with no global language needed by 2050 – thanks to machine translation and related factors. Fascinating thought, but in the meantime I remain keen to build organisations with diverse nationalities involved, to ensure both access to native speakers of key languages and a sensitivity to other cultures.

Graffiti 1 Graffiti 2 Nicholson Building lift operator’s back and braces Elaine photographing in Nicholson Building Kaleidoscopic Retro story in Nicholson Building Sign in Nicholson Building corridor Yarra River, shadowed and sunlit Waste trap – Ian Kiernan would approve Fish sculpture The s-word is everywhere

Started day with breakfast at Rosati, an Italian restaurant at 95 Flinders Lane, which was delightful. Then we wandered across to the Nicholson Building, which Elaine had been encouraged to visit for arts and crafts activities. Weird place. Reminded me of the buildings in the novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I read almost a decade ago on the recommendation of Tim Delfgaauw.

Fascinating to visit the Immigration Museum. Reminded us of just how lucky we are to be able to fly places, rather than having to crash across oceans in steerage. Then we went back to the IMAX theatre later in the day, where we saw two 3D films, Dolphins & Whales, by Jean-Michel Cousteau and narrated by Daryl Hannah, which struck me as worthy but very dated, the voice-over off-puttingly pious. By contrast, the Hubble telescope film made great use of 3D technology – and the voice-over, by Leonardo DiCaprio, was fresh and modern.

Flight to Hong Kong left at 23.50. Finished William Gibson’s Zero History, which I had been reading alongside a couple of other books, and which got better as it went along – and then slept for around seven hours. Hong Kong was cloudy and rainy, but we saw some spectacular views of Chinese mountains in cloud as we headed homewards. I slept another eight hours, and could easily have slept some more.

Picked up the latest Newsweek as we went through Heathrow, to see how they have presented the green company rankings we worked on earlier this year. Am quite impressed with the results, though aware – as I have been arguing throughout the Australian trip – that we need to be much more careful on how benchmarking, rating and ranking are done. This is the theme of recent work by SustainAbility, spotlighted in their latest report, Rate the Raters.

Temptress Circe awaits at the top of the Ian Potter Gallery escalator John Davis 1 John Davis 2 Child’s finger pointing at John Davis fish John Davis 4 John Davis 5 Haloes searching for heads John Davis 6 Haloes again No halo due, but missed: I shadow John Lennon at 70

Up early to do the second Qantas Foundation Lecture here at the Stamford Plaza Hotel, this time over a 90-minute breakfast. Then, in the afternoon, across to the Melbourne Business School to lead the second CSI workshop on social innovation.

In between, a phenomenal visit to the Ian Potter Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria, where – among many other delights – we stumbled across the John Davis exhibition, Presence. Had heard of him ages ago, but had never seen his work in this way. Astounding. One title of a series of artwork he did sticks in my mind: ‘Bent on Mayhem’. Fun to see part of the exhibition with a human wave of children – who loved the diversity of the fishlife on display.

Also very taken with Objects by Mari Funaki, who died earlier this year.

Early aircraft aloft in Melbourne Museum Pygmy Blue Whale skeleton Tilting windmills Colt Navy revolver – slightly extruded by lens Polynesian canoes The Moon and me Airborne skeleton My species and other animals Look at me Carved by someone consigned to mental asylum Who’s lunch? One of my favourite exhibits Take 2 Fish and boat Ghosts Bikes Heavier duty bikers

We were issued with identities when entering the Titanic exhibition at the Melbourne Museum today. I turned out to be Wallace Henry Hartley, the bandmaster who – according to survivor accounts – courageously kept the band playing until the moment the waves swept them away. He had already been across the Atlantic 80 times, apparently.  Makes me wonder whether I’m doing the same, speechifying about the risk of icebergs while the collective vessel speeds ever deeper into the ice-field?

As we went through the mock-up for the first-class cabins, The Beautiful Blue Danube was playing, one of my 16 Desert Island Disks. The exhibition, despite the crowding, is one of the best I have been to. You touch a wall of ice that gives a sense of how cold the waters were that night – and the exhibits that most moved me included a pair of children’s marbles, a pair of pince-nez spectacles and a cracked porthole.

One of the unquestioned rogues of the piece (in terms of cutting corners on lifeboat provision and making good his escape when so many others perished) was Bruce Ismay, buried just across the Common from us, in Putney Vale Cemetery. Many years ago, we met one of his descendants (initials DI) in Pembrokeshire, via my godmother Kay, who worked for her. My main memory of her is that she had just finished hand-grinding a telescope lens – a fact that stuck in my mind given that the lookouts on the ship didn’t have binoculars: those had been left behind, it seems, in the rush to put out to sea on that ill-fated voyage.

Melbourne Museum itself is brilliantly laid out and designed, the exhibits a constant source of wonder and new information. Later, we went to see James Cameron’s 3D film, of his Titanic expedition, Ghosts of the Abyss, which was extraordinary, with robot arms extending to inches in front of our nose, even while the full display was seven stories high. Really brought home the horrors of the disaster.

Polly Woodside 1 Polly Woodside 2 Elaine and historic catches Ready to fly? Girl with pearl earring Graffiti 1 Graffiti 2

Flew down to Melbourne today, spotting where we went to the coastal headland with Paul and Micelle. I bought three books at the airport and got a good way through one on the flight, a fascinating history of flight, The Airplane, by Jay Spenser, sub-titled How Ideas Gave Us Wings. The other two books are: Tim Flannery’s Here on Earth, which Elaine plunged into, and Climate Wars, by Gwynne Dyer.

Haunted as we flew, though, in a plane chock-full with Japanese tourists, by the story I read in a book I picked up in the airport bookstore, an account of what happened to a group of Australian nurses who fell into Japanese hands after the fall of Singapore.

On Radji Beach tells of the dreadful events that followed the attempted surrender of the survivors of a ship that was bombed as it fled Singapore. The Europeans were separated out and marched into the sea, where they – and 21 nurses – were machine-gunned to death. Miraculously, one nurse survived to tell the tale, after surrendering again, this time more successfully, and spending the rest of the war in a Japanese camp.

One wonders if these present-day Japanese travellers have any clue of what their country did before and during WWII? But then I wonder whether Australians recall how the Aborigines were hunted down like foxes, or young Britons remember things like the Opium Wars?

Always think that I prefer Melbourne, but temperature here is significantly lower, rain has been falling and our room at the Stamford Plaza is dark and rather noisy. Still, we found a wonderful restaurant on the other side of the river, Pure South, and had a tremendous meal – immeasurably enhanced, for me at least, by the smell of the recently trimmed box hedge smack alongside where we were sitting, one of my favourite aromas. The InVivo sauvignon blanc from New Zealand was rather nice, too.