Search Results for: Tim elkington

 

Although what was meant to be a week of holiday has been gobbled up by a project for WWF International, I have managed to sneak in some other reading around the edges – and yesterday finished Philip Kerr‘s wonderful Bernie Gunther novel, If the Dead Rise Not. First time I can recollect reading a book that was both a prequel to earlier novels in a series – and that then goes on to extend the story. Have read all the Gunthers to date – and love the style and atmospheres conjured, be it in Germany, Argentina or Cuba. Saw this morning that he’s speaking at the Edinburgh Festival – wish I was going to be there.

Source: Met Office

Often, the future asks the past why it couldn’t see what was in front of its nose? After a rather frantic time week, I have been working at home today, focusing on a challenge we face in Singapore and on the follow-up to our Biosphere Economy project. In the process, it kept being borne in on me that apparently disconnected events in today’s world would look very different through tomorrow’s lenses.  

Take the devastating drought and fires currently impacting Russia. Many people will think that this is something solely for the Russians, while others may feel that there is a measure of poetic justice for a country that has been pretty recalcitrant on climate change – believing that it will be advantaged as the warming trend opens up northern areas to farming and minerals extraction.

But the evidence is that what is happening in Russia is going to have a pretty immediate impact on the lives of millions of people living elsewhere, not least through food prices. As the Financial Times reports today on its front page, wheat prices have risen faster than at any time since 1973 as the implications of the lost grain production in Russia are factored into markets.

And then there is what is happening in Pakistan, with devastating floods – all of which may look disconnected from what is happening in Russia and from what will happen in the future. The BBC reports that 2.5 million people have already been affected in Pakistan. While all of this may seem a long way off for those of us on the other side of the world, the implications for our security and for future would look a great deal clearer from the perspective of someone looking back from, say, 2030.

I don’t know whether the sort of mapping that Google Earth is now offering – or the mapping developed by agencies like the UK Met Office – will help people see what is increasingly before their eyes, but somehow I doubt it. Too much else is before our eyes in the same moment – and the sorts of trajectories our climate may now be on are totally outside our experience. 

Someone asked me yesterday whether I was an optimist – and, truth be told, I am, but in the context of the sort of analysis offered by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse. Whereas Adolf Hitler thought that the Third Reich would last 1,000 years, and the architects of the British Empire probably dreamed of something for similar for the pink-painted areas of the globe, my sense is that we will get increasingly used to seeing images of the globe with swelling yellow, orange and red zones showing the areas where global warming – or heating, as some suggest it should not be called – is steadily bringing our planet to the boil.

I shared a platform earlier late last week with Lord Giddens, at an event held in the National Liberal Club, and his odyssey into climate science in recent years (as an open-minded non-scientist) made me wish every business and political leader could spend a day with him. There were still one or two climate skeptics in the room, which made me wonder whether in a decade or two such people will have converted or gone underground, for fear of meeting with rough justice? One question that has been in my mind for some time is whether there could be some form of retrospective justice, perhaps an Ecological Crimes Tribunal, with the criminalisation – even demonisation – of today’s climate-deniers?

Dolphin mosaic, Bignor Vineyard, Bignor Self-portrait, Goodwood Sculpture Park Steven Gregory’s ‘Fish on a Bicycle’ 3 ladies and a cat Distortion Ralph Brown’s ‘La Sposa’ Jilly Sutton’s ‘Fallen Deodar’ Over ‘Fallen Deodar’ to Manfred Kielnhofer’s ‘Timeguards’ ‘Timeguards’, with vegetal echos Phillip King’s ‘Sun’s Roots II’ Danny Lane’s ‘Stairway’

Started off the day at the Bignor Roman Villa, which has some interesting mosaics, and a couple of poignant children’s skeletons, and then decided on the spur of the moment to go to the Goodwood Sculpture Park again – although, once again, it proved very hard to find. Well worth the effort, though. Lovely weather as we walked around – and very few people indeed. Seems something of a well kept secret, this place.

Chidham 1 Chidham 2 – the crash-site is alongside the copse on the horizon Chidham 3 Chidham 4 Chidham 5 Coastal signpost Bosham boat West Wittering flag Elaine Dunes, East Head Prospecting East Head panorama 1 Panorama 2 Panorama 3

Next month, more precisely 16 August, will mark the seventieth anniversary of the day Tim was shot down during the Battle of Britain, with his Hurricane crashing into the south end of the Chidham peninsula, part of Chichester Harbour, and him landing by parachute near West Wittering. We got as close as we could to the crash site without infringing private property more than we already had done to get to the coastal path, then walked on through a haze of butterflies – and what I think were thunder flies, which blackened by orange shirt at one stage. One treat was seeing an egret on the shore at one point.

After a ploughman’s lunch in Bosham, we drove south to West Wittering, where we parked and made our way out onto East Head, a wonderful complex of sand dunes. The landscape was intensely familiar, given that we have quite a number of the paintings that Caroline did many years ago after visiting the place, for the same reason that we were there. A huge, atmospheric sky, but the rain – which had seemed imminent for much of the day, held off.

River fronds Skyscape 1 Skyscape 2 Skyscape 3: where Catholics prayed for generations, at some peril Garden bugler Chairs Damsel in repose Convocation Skyscape 4 Skyscape 5

We drove south to Midhurst in Sussex today, walking around the town and stumbling on the ruins of Cowdray House. I had known of its role in history in Tudor times – but had no idea that this is where it was. A wonderfully kept site, but a pretty tragic history at times, what with the fire that reduced the great house to ruins in 1793, and the death by drowning of an  heir around the same time. Not sure I believe the story of a curse laid upon the family during the dissolution of the monasteries, that they would be destroyed by fire and water, but it provides a neat hook on which to hang the tragedies.

Later in the afternoon, we arrived at the house where we were to stay, set in woodland, found with the good services of one of Alastair Sawday‘s invaluable guides, only to find the owners in turmoil, she having reacted badly to treatment with monoclonal antibodies. As they headed off to the hospital, we settled in. I had looked the place up on Google Earth and seen a huge quarry nearby, but there was no sense of it from the house itself – and the landscape around here is wonderful. Thank heavens they have declared it part of the country’s latest National Park, including, apparently, the sand ridge into which the quarry has been digging.