Writing

  • Goodbye Sneeze

    Today Sneeze died. She was one of my mum’s two terriers. She was a smashing little dog with bags of character. Even my father, a man who really didn’t like small dogs, grew to love her in the years before he died. One day, Sneeze went missing in the village. Dad, distraught, went out to…

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    Birthday greetings

    Today is the UK Career Academy Foundation’s fifth birthday. The day started with a presentation to business representatives at Newham College with Stephen Timms MP (with a brilliant roleplay perfromed by Career Academy students) and ended with a piece of birthday cake at our staff meeting in Canary Wharf. And yesterday was our youngest member…

  • Presenting our findings

    We used the analogy of fireflies in the dark as the basis of our presentation, describing each of the community entrepreneurs that we met as a different firefly. Each member of the team presented and we used video footage as well as photographs to illustrate what we’d seen. We ended the presentation with a poem…

  • A week of surprises

    The week of travelling all over the north of India is now over and we’re now working on our fifteen minute presentation which we give either tomorrow or the day after to the Princess Royal and the rest of the conference. Our group has seen a lot. Reforestation of mining areas, the installation of electricity…

  • By train to Dehradun

    The journey from Delhi to Dehradun was fairly uneventful, except to say that Delhi station first thing in the morning is an amazing place. Busy people moving everywhere; porters carrying extraordinarily heavy loads; people on the train tracks with hoses, washing away what has fallen through from the carriages whilst standing in the station; the…

  • Two days of talk

    It’s been a fairly packed two days. I arrived at Delhi international airport at about half past six in the morning, thanks to a delayed British Airways flight. From that moment on, everything has happened punctually, quite at odds with everything I’d been led to believe about the organisation of events in India. A taxi…