| Coconut Joan
No compunctions about eating dessert first |
My favourite, favourite talent act of all time — Hoop La La. I’m gutted they didn’t go through to the finals.
Oh, the cheese! The cheese!
For those interested, the two that did make it to the final were George Sampson and Strike. They were both pretty good too, I’ll admit.
I am often asked what my job is. I don’t really enjoy answering this question because I feel like I’m selling something that I myself don’t understand clearly. I’m not even sure why I feel like I need to ’sell’ my job as an being interesting or worthwhile. Yet, I do this anyway.
I will try to explain my job here and see if I can at least clear up in my own head what I ‘do for a living’.
My job title is ’sustainability consultant’. Sustainability is a huge field, covering:
And so on.
Obviously, no one person can work in all areas of sustainability. My work particularly covers sustainability related to cities and urban systems — buildings, transport, energy supply, water supply, waste treatment, logistics, schooling… I also foray into job creation, habitat management, equity and access… Very peripherally, I also look at questions of public participation in decision making (e.g. voting), literacy, religious inclusion, and so on.
I generally work in developed countries, or at least the wealthier parts of developing countries (e.g. cities in China and the Middle East).
Most of my work is in large multidisciplinary projects. Typically, about 10 or 15 teams around the company (or from outside the company) are working together to design a new town or rebuild part of an existing city. My team’s job involves:
My role is often to manage the finances of the project, go to meetings with the project managers, present to the client, and coordinate the report. I don’t often do the modelling — there are others more capable of that than me.
That’s most of my job. Occasionally, I do projects that aren’t multidisciplinary. That’s when a client comes to our team directly and asks for strategic sustainability advice, like helping them develop a climate change policy.
I like my job. I like it because I get to look at the big picture. I like working in teams and meeting new people.
There are things I don’t like. Between teams, there are sometimes personality clashes and political issues about who does what work. Sometimes, I feel frustrated because I doubt our advice will actually be implemented in real life. At my most frustrated times, I wonder if I’m just a paper pusher, generating work for myself. What’s the point in producing a report that no one ever reads?
Now that I think about it, I guess that even if no one pays attention to a particular report I write, because I’ve learned from doing it, it will help me be more effective in the next project I do. That’s a happy thought, isn’t it!
Here are some photos from my trip to Belgium and Germany last month.
A gate in the treasure room of the Belfry of Brugge.
The moon over a building in Brugge.
There are secret courtyards dotted throughout Berlin. Mo, our host in Berlin, took us to one that was the urban canvas of artists. We found this giant mechanical bat, which sprang to roaring and whistling life once we fed it a euro coin.
The Jewish Museum in Berlin. The museum space has no windows except for these slits through the metal walls.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The square columns of the memorial ‘are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason’. Having walked amongst the looming columns while rain drizzled down, I can say that the architects and engineers managed to create the atmosphere they were aiming for.
The Neptune Fountain in Berlin.
Rooftop statues in Dresden.
In Leipzing, Damjan managed to get a water bell to resonate by running his hands back and forth on the handles. The water shimmied too.
This comes from the Marriage Carousel in Nuremburg, which represents ‘marriage from the first stages of ardent love via exhausting struggles, and right through to the death bed’.
German cities are dotted with public bicycles, managed by Deutsch Bahn. You need to call a phone number in order to get a particular bike unlocked. I only ever saw one person riding a DB bike. I wonder if the bikes are used much?
The very impressive, very Gothic Dom in Cologne/Koln.
And here is on the inside, full of tourists who defy the rules in the hope that they can somehow light the awesome space with their puny flashes. I hate dumb tourists.
Today, I restocked on the things that make me a girl. I met up with Bettina, who I studied with last year. We very efficiently traipsed down Oxford Street and Kilburn’s high street, and I emerged with two new pairs of shoes, two pairs of tights, foundation and matching brush, and hair conditioner.
I don’t often go shopping for non-food. It’s not that I don’t like it; there’s just some inertia to overcome.
Today, I volunteered at Pangea Day, ‘a global event bringing the world together through film’. I surveyed people about how they travelled to the London event. We will use this information to work out the carbon footprint of Pangea Day in London and Los Angeles.
The films were great, really thoughtful and often funny. The hosts and speakers were a little bit too earnest for my taste. My favourite part of the evening was at the very end, when percussionists all around the world played to the same rhythm. We had video feeds with drummers from USA, Rwanda, Egypt, India, and other places, as well as Planet Drum live on stage in London. I was dancing on our picnic rug.
Watch all the films here. One of my favourites is Elevator Music. My friend George recommends More, which I didn’t get to see because I was surveying people.
Last week, wracked by neck pain, the only thing I could do was sit on a couch and count Tube stations. Damjan had said that he thought there were around 200. This, in my opinion, was a gross overestimate.
To prove it, I got out an Underground map and started crossing them off. I took bets. My vote was for 112 stations. Neo guessed 100. Damian was more ambitious at 140.
I took a broad view of what a ’station’ was. Anything on the Tube map was fair game, so I ended up counting stations on the Overground and Docklands Light Rail, as well as those on the temporarily closed East London line. I excluded the recently decomissioned Shoreditch station and included the new station at Heathrow Terminal 5.
Very quickly, the tally steamed past our paltry estimates. Even Damjan’s ‘gross overestimate’ was left in the dust trail of my black pen, as shown below.
The answer is… 344! To me it seems like a massive number. Who would have thought?
I lit a match to light up our gas stove and, lightning fast, something was spat out from the match onto on my bare arm.
‘Ooooow!’ I thought, as I frantically shook off the glowing spots. The spots floated to the kitchen floor where they burned for half a second longer, then died.
I waited for the stinging to stop and when it didn’t, I splashed cold water on my arm. There is now a tiny shallow burn bubble on my left upper arm.
A very, very thought provoking video about the information age in which we live — Shift happens. Watch it. I like the first half best. The predictions of the future near the end of the video are a bit fuzzier. If you don’t want to think too much, then enjoy the music.
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