Author: Mark Hannam

In September, it was reported that the Chinese authorities had arrested two people suspected of causing irreversible damage to the Great Wall.  The two are said to have used an excavator to knock a large hole through the wall, allowing motor vehicles to pass more quickly to and from a nearby construction site in Shanxi province, where they were both employed.  The Great Wall – actually, a composite of many smaller walls, built over many years and then connected – was started almost three thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Chinese empire, and is over 21 thousand kilometres in length.  It is designated a UNESCO heritage site and is today a major tourist attraction.  In other words, what was started as a project to keep people out of China has transformed into a project to bring them to China (at least, temporarily).  The hole in the Great Wall will be expensive to repair and the two workers, who have been charged with damaging a cultural relic rather than a military border post, will no doubt be punished for their crime. 

The same month that workers were creating a short-cut through the Great Wall, some unknown person(s) used a chainsaw to cut down a two-hundred-year-old sycamore tree, that stood at an iconic point along Hadrian’s Wall, in the north of England.  (This site had become famous as a location from a film version of the story of Robin Hood, made in 1991, although why Robin would travel to Northumbria on his way from the English Channel to Nottinghamshire remains a mystery.)  Hadrian’s Wall was built slightly less than two thousand years ago, to protect the northern border of the Roman empire and is merely 120 kilometres in length.  Nonetheless, it is also a UNESCO heritage site and a modest tourist attraction.  Many local people were outraged by the felling of the tree – which appears to have caused some minor damage to a section of the wall – for which there seems to have been no reason other than a perverse desire to vandalise an object of natural beauty.  Arrests have been made but no-one has yet been charged with a crime associated with the tree felling. 

Continue reading “Hole in the wall”

A few weeks ago, I walked the southern half of the New River Path, from Enfield Town to Canonbury.  The two important things to know about the New River is that it is neither new nor a river.   It is an aqueduct that runs for 45km from Ware, in Hertfordshire, to Islington, and was constructed just over four hundred years ago, to bring fresh water from the river systems north of London into the city.   The scheme initially ran into engineering and financial problems but was completed due to the efforts of Hugh Myddelton, a business leader and entrepreneur in the first half of the seventeenth century, who is memorialised today by a statue that stands on Islington Green, just off Upper Street.  The New River Company, an early joint stock company, ran the aqueduct for many years, although it is now integrated into the Thames Water infrastructure and still supplies the reservoirs on the eastern fringes of London, between Hackney and Walthamstow. 

Plentiful clean water is an essential prerequisite for civilized urban life, and it is worth remembering that as recently as the nineteenth century, much of London did not have a reliable supply and that there were a significant number of annual deaths from the diseases associated with contaminated water.  From time to time the problems associated with poor water management became overwhelmingly obvious to everyone who visited London.  Funding for the sewerage system that Joseph Bazalgette built, which helped to rid London of cholera, was prompted by the “great stink” of 1858, when summer heat produced nauseous gases along the banks of the Thames, where untreated human and animal waste had been dumped for many years.  Today, we remember Myddelton and Bazalgette with gratitude: no-one in public life would seriously advocate dismantling the clean water supply system, nor would they allow unregulated private interests to jeopardise its integrity. 

Continue reading “Clean air”

When I was in my mid-teens, I watched a tv programme that presented a humorous view of suburban Britain, set around twenty-five years into the future. Two-and-half decades forward is an interesting time to speculate about, being close enough for most things to be roughly similar, but far enough ahead for some things to have changed significantly.  I recall that in the tv show there were some jokes about the improved taste of instant food and the widespread use of robot teachers at school, but neither of the two young people who were the focus of the programme had a mobile phone, which is perhaps the most visible lifestyle change that – in fact – occurred between the years when I was fifteen and forty.

One scene that has stayed with me, was a shot of the two teenagers walking down a street that was littered with rubbish, the sky busy with helicopters from which bundles of coloured papers were being thrown to the people below.  It was a time when bulk mail, as it was then called, had just started: in addition to letters, magazines, and the like, that were personally addressed to my parents – and, very occasionally, letters addressed to me – we would receive impersonal advertising material through our letterbox, usually promoting products for sale at a local store or supermarket.  These were delivered to every house in the street, sometimes with the mail and sometimes separately, as part of a blanket advertising campaign.  The tv show had imagined a vast increase in impersonal adverts, thrown directly into the streets from marketing vehicles in the air.  The idea seemed ludicrous, but at the same time a little worrying: surely, we would never allow bulk mail drops on this scale, creating vast amounts of unread and unwanted street litter.

Continue reading “Junk mail”

Driving around the countryside of Co Donegal, occasionally I will pass a temporary sign that says, Wake in Progress.  The quiet, winding lanes will be full of parked cars and vans, as the local community come to pay their respects at the former home of the departed.  The tradition of holding a wake – the time between death and burial, when friends and relatives sit and wait beside the corpse of the deceased, a period of reflection, a remembrance but also a celebration – has declined across much of Western Europe but remains commonplace in Ireland.  I imagine that today most wakes are decorous, but that has not always been the case.  There is a famous Irish song from the mid-nineteenth century about Tim Finnegan, who fell off a ladder when drunk, breaking his skull.  During the wake held at his house, an argument broke out, which turned into a fight, during which a bottle of whiskey was thrown, broke and spilled over his prostrate body, at which point he sprang back to life, saying: Thunderin’ blazes! You think I’m dead?   Excess whiskey was the cause of Tim’s apparent death and so too his return to life.

This paradox was, no doubt, why the song lyric appealed to James Joyce, who borrowed the revenant’s name for his final masterpiece: Finnegans Wake.  In this book, for some time known as Work in Progress, which takes the form of an extended series of philosophical reflections blended with multiple digressions, wordplay and jokes, there is repeated suggestion that what begins must end and what ends must begin again, that what rises will fall and that what falls will rise again, and that all of life is repetition and recycling.  Joyce spoke several languages and enjoyed inventing words that were combinations of elements from different tongues.  The name Finnegan can be decomposed into fin, the French for end, and egan a homonym for again in English: Finnegans means, therefore, to end again and again.  The word Wake might suggest the noun that means the ceremony of remembrance for the dead, or it might suggest the command that means wake up!  His title, therefore, combines ideas of both death and life.  These themes of circularity and continuity are emphasised throughout the text of the book, which starts and ends mid-sentence – the same sentence, Joyce claimed – and which is promiscuous with grammar as well as language, spelling, and narrative structure.  

Continue reading “Awake”

We were twelve in number – six executives and six non-executives – and we had spent the last five hours in a spacious conference room in Vauxhall, on a hot and humid June afternoon, discussing aspects of the company’s strategy for the next three years.  As the meeting came to an end, and the prospect of dinner together at a nearby Eritrean restaurant came into view, as Chair of the meeting, I brought the formal proceedings to a close.  “Let’s take a few minutes”, I said, “before we leave for our meal, to decompose”.   My words provoked some amusement among my colleagues: “Do you mean decompress?”  “Do you want us to turn to compost?”  On the contrary, I had meant exactly what I had said.  At the start of a Board meeting, each attendee should compose themselves, making ready to come together as a group to do the difficult work of governance; at the end of the meeting, each should feel free to decompose, to return to their constituent self, and allow time for individual relaxation and rest. 

“What do you do at Board meetings,” one of my friends asked me recently, “apart from eating sandwiches?”  In the boardroom, as elsewhere, there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Governance is a specialised form of work, and to do it well takes lengthy preparation time, high levels of concentration, the employment of good listening and discursive skills, and the ability and willingness to develop collective recommendations in a constructive and collegiate manner.  This is not easy work and should be undertaken with the serious and responsible mindset that the task demands.  The Board is ultimately responsible – legally and morally – for the oversight of the company, the effective deployment of the resources at its disposal, and for securing the interests of various groups of stakeholders, including investors, staff, customers, suppliers, and the wider community.  Good Board meetings require all participants to come to the table primed and prepared to do this work. 

Continue reading “Decomposed”