Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Meeting Management

The morning meeting went on for far too long today - the diagonal stripes of sunshine across the table gradualy strightened to the vertical.

Inbetween mentally undressing the young and very beautiful and sharp and cool and lovely and cruel and ambitious project manager, taking the occasional note, and slurping Coke, the passage of the sun across the table and the diamond sharp winter landscape through the slats in the blind reminded me of John Betjeman's poem Upper Lambourne:

Up the ash-tree climbs the ivy,
Up the ivy climbs the sun,
With a twenty-thousand pattering
Has a valley breeze begun,
Feathery ash, neglected elder,
Shift the shade and make it run

Shift the shade toward the nettles,
And the nettles set it free
To streak the stained Carrara headstone
Where, in nineteen-twenty-three,
He who trained a hundred winners
Paid the Final Entrance Fee.

Leathery limbs of Upper Lambourne,
Leathery skin from sun and wind,
Leathery breeches, spreading stables,
Shining saddles left behind
To the down the string of horses
Moving out of sight and mind.

Feathery ash in leathery Lambourne
Waves above the sarsen stone,
And Edwardian plantations
So coniferously moan
As to make the swelling downland,
Far-surrounding, seem their own.

Great stuff. And she didn't say 'impact' once.

2 Comments:

Blogger David Young said...

Roger,

a few issues (not relating to your latest piece)

1) I've just watched a tape of Derren Brown's 'Heist'. I recorded it ages ago and didn't get around to seeing it until yesterday. I can't get it out of my mind now. Can't get over three out of four (selected) participants deciding to hold up a security van. Have you seen it? If so, what did you make of it?

2) What's happened to the Gash blog?

3) Would you call what's happening in Gaza now as civil war? I'm stuck as to whether to say Iraq is in a civil war, as I'm used to there being two clearly defined sides to one (roundheads/cavaliers, union/condfederacy, government/maoists etc) and Iraq isn't that clear cut. In Gaza's case there is Fatah and Hamas. What do people in your ISM movement feel about it? Genuinely curious.

David

2:13 pm  
Blogger roGER said...

David, I'll get back to you in an e-mail but I do need to update the home page - Gash seems to be no more and one or two of the other links are to sites that seem quiet to say the least...

11:32 am  

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