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Category: Culture

  • Review: Tomorrow will be a Good Day by Captain Sir Thomas Moore

    Review: Tomorrow will be a Good Day by Captain Sir Thomas Moore

    Reading Captain Tom’s autobiography feels a bit like watching one of those really good X Factor auditions, you know it is a bit staged and quite formulaic but it still makes you feel warm and fuzzy. The book has a wonderfully satisfying narrative arch following the extraordinary life of a seemingly ordinary man who suffers some tragedies but finishes triumphant. Although the tone is mostly gentle, Moore is surprisingly frank in its detailing of some of the sadnesses in his romantic relationships, from descriptions of the “loveless bed” in his first marriage to the death of his wife, Pamela, “to watch someone you love decline through dementia is a slow kind of torture,” he says. It also portrays Moore’s warmth and humour, for instance, on his knighthood he writes: “I joked that I hoped the Queen wasn’t too heavy-handed with the sword.” It is this collision between the ordinary and extraordinary that captured the nation’s hearts when the 100-year-old walked around his garden to raise money for the NHS and this shines through in the autobiography.

    Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day: , £20.00

     

  • How the travel sector handled Covid-19

    How the travel sector handled Covid-19

    By Lana Woolf

    There is a phenomenon called Stendhalismo named after the French novelist Stendhal, which refers to the act of travelling abroad and then swooning before objects of great beauty. It was in Florence where Stendhal – born Marie-Henri Beyle – first experienced an almost hallucinatory sense of awe at the Italian experience: ‘I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence,’ he wrote, ‘close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty.’

    Two hundred years later, we have a new version of this phenomenon – but altered to reflect our new pandemic reality. It might be too flippant to call it Covidismo, but it can entail pausing in our UK homes and suddenly having a flashback as to all the travelling we did, which we now doubt we’ll ever do to the same extent. For those of us who were lucky enough to travel widely, a rhythm we hardly knew we had established has been suddenly suspended. Never again will the airport be quite so routine; nor shall we return home to find ourselves gearing up for the next trip with quite the same regularity.

    Time is now marked in a different way. What else to do then, but sit at home and dream – of Florence, of New York, of Kyoto, of all the places that we have been to and loved. In our best moments we can feel grateful we had what we had; but it is also possible to swoon Stendhalstyle in our kitchens and feel bereft at what have been so arbitrarily deprived of.

    Balearic Blues

    But what if travel is your livelihood? Like a career in aviation it would have seemed at the start of the year the safest of all sectors – and perhaps few countries would be safer to work in than that perennial favourite Mallorca.

    Sometimes during Covid-19 I have thought back to this island of peace and lemony light, where Robert Graves lived out his years, and where Chopin and George Sand visited. It was surreal to imagine a touristless summer there.

    Miguel Feliz is the general manager of Sant Francesc, a five-star hotel in the centre of Parma. ‘It’s been a tough and challenging year for all of us, especially those in the hospitality industry,’ he explains. ‘We are extremely lucky that Sant Francesc is a well-established, year-round property and Palma is a popular destination even in the cooler months,’ he explains, adding that he ‘remains optimistic that we will begin to see some normality from September onwards, which is just in time for my favourite month in Mallorca.’

    If the guests return – and at time of writing the government’s muchcriticised quarantine policy has made travel an anxious business – then guests will find a subtly altered hotel. ‘We have put extensive new measures in place by following the recommendations and directives from the Spanish National Health Services, as well as the World Health Organisation, in order to ensure the wellbeing of our guests and team members,’ Feliz tells me. ‘These include everything from twice-daily temperature checks for all staff as well as guests on arrival, to mandatory use of masks for our team – and masks and hand sanitizer being readily available to guests at all times. Extensive new cleaning programmes have been put in place for guest rooms and all public areas and social distancing will be encouraged wherever possible.’

    As workable as that sounds, it was also a tough time for the company in another sense when the owners had to address the question of the expected opening of a sister property Can Ferrerata in Santanyí. ‘We decided to postpone until March 2021 and take our time, in order to give it the opening it deserves.’

    This hiatus has been painful – and of course Sant Francesc is just one story among thousands globally where hotels have had to pause, pivot, or just take the financial hit. The effect on the hotel industry has been seismic, as any brief walk through central London immediately attests: one thinks of the empty forecourt of Buckingham Palace, or the nowunphotographed lions of Trafalgar Square.

    But travel is a vast industry with numerous professions attached to it, which  have experienced the knock-on effects of the virus. From aviation, hotel events, to travel PR, and travel journalism, it’s a sector full of economically significant subsets.

    I catch up with Cathy Adams, who is the travel editor at the Independent. She’s on maternity leave at the moment, and says she’s grateful to have a break from breast-feeding to share her thoughts with me. For her, travel journalism was already in a state of ruction pre-Covid. ‘Even before coronavirus swept the globe, travel journalism was changing fast,’ she tells me. ‘We were working to promote underserved destinations rather than those afflicted by overtourism; and the climate crisis had made us rethink how we spoke about travel and holidays to promote more responsible tourism. Then came coronavirus, which in many ways has accelerated the issues many travel journalists have been grappling with in recent years.’

    So is travel journalism still a career you can go into? The answer is yes, but with caveats. ‘Travel journalism, when, like travel itself, it returns to the masses, will continue to become more thoughtful: expect more coverage of British holiday spots as travel restrictions drag on and we want to inject more money into our domestic tourism market. Plus, the coronavirus has highlighted just how risky travel can be – in terms of spreading the virus, and how quickly border closures can stop travel; the world will no longer be seen as a free-for-all, and journalism will take this into account when deciding which destinations to talk about.

    And will hotels still feel able to host significant numbers of journalists in order to make sure they get their copy? Adams explains that ‘editorial will remain an important part of a destination’s marketing plans, but I imagine with the focus on fewer trips and a smaller tourism market generally, they won’t be quite the all-out affairs they once were.’

    How PR went into ER

    Every one of these hotels has its marketing budget and there are many PR firms around the world earning their crust by promoting them. One of the best of these is Perowne International run by the redoubtable Julia Perowne.

    Perowne recalls for me the bizarre events of February 2020: ‘I realised in February that the situation was getting more serious and that its impact would spread outside China. In many ways the hospitality industry was one of the first sectors impacted and sadly will likely be the last.’ It was a fast-moving situation, she says. ‘We have clients all over the world and several beautiful hotels in Italy which was impacted first in Europe. We were shocked by the speed and severity of its development there and could see quickly that this would not be contained to one country. In early March we started to analyse the situation in more detail and prior to lockdown actually went to our clients and offered them significant fee reductions to help them through this tough time.’

    Overnight, the nature of the job changed: ‘The most significant thing has been the emotional support the clients have needed rather than just the practical,’ explains Perowne. ‘This has been a devastating time for the industry – businesses that have worked so hard have been hit badly and there’s definitely been a need to help people emotionally get through this. In addition, we have needed to look ahead to the future and ensure that when we come through this, the clients are looking as desirable and as relevant as ever. The consumer’s values have changed over the last few months and we need to ensure that we are prepared for that.’

    Perowne was forced to take advantage of the furlough scheme (we’re hopefully in the process of reinstating them’), though she would have liked to have seen a different scheme in place. ‘It would have been great if the government could have subsidised salaries and allowed people to still work if they could as they did in Ireland,’ she argues. ‘We desperately needed all-hands-on-deck but simply weren’t getting the fees from the clients so we had to utilise the scheme.’

    Echoing Adams’ observations about journalism, Perowne says that Covid-19 ‘will simply accelerate the changes that were happening,’ adding that ‘we have to be compelling storytellers.’

    Tricky Calculus

    Perowne praises the agility of her clients. One of these is the Cambridge University Arms, where Ian James, the general manager, approached the crisis in a highly community-minded way. Although he closed the hotel on 22nd March ‘with heavy heart’, he explains that ‘it was also important to us to help alleviate the strain on our NHS.’

    As the city’s oldest continually operating hotel, the team was minded to take the long view. ‘The property has truly stood the test of time – living through two world wars, the fight for woman’s rights and in 1665, the University Arms temporary closed its doors due to the Bubonic Plague,’ James explains. ‘Isaac Newton had to work from home and he used this time to develop Calculus and the theory of Gravity. Therefore, we remain positive that we will soon put this latest travail behind us. As Solomon said, “This too shall pass”.

    It’s also a hotel which has been caring toward its staff and the people in the immediate locality. ‘As the hotel closed and we were heading into lock down, our main concern was the wellbeing of our team,’ he explains. ‘Our Chef Director Tristan Welch and his team coordinated care packages to keep everyone going during the difficult times of self-isolation. Our ‘Most Wanted’ packages were filled with essentials including many items that were proving difficult to come by in the supermarkets at the time. These included everything from pasta, flour and toilet paper, to oats, sugar, cereals, stock cubes, tinned goods as well as fresh fruit. In addition to this, the property has donated some key items locally to those in need. These included disposable aprons and gloves to the Papworth Trust as well as eggs, yogurt, vegetables and other food items to Cambridge Cyrenians.

    This is a sector which has experienced the severest setbacks of any. And yet it’s a hopeful sector. James is cautiously optimistic: ‘The desire people have to travel will always prevail and the industry will always need fresh talent.’

    Miguel Feliz echoes those sentiments: ‘The hospitality industry is so versatile and offers the unique opportunity to travel the world and learn about different cultures, so there is always an appetite for travel.

    Nothing will take that away from us.’ Perowne adds in respect of a career path in travel PR: ‘for those who really want to go for it, the opportunities are endless.’

    So in a sense the buoyancy of the sector comes back to Stendhalismo: a French writer broke out into a cold sweat because of the treasures of Florence, and there will always be a part of us that will long to do the same. Far-flung parts and new experiences are things we’ll always be susceptible to, and a virus will not decrease our need for adventure – indeed, in the long run it may only increase it.

     

  • Review: The Serendipity Mindset by Dr. Christian Busch

    Review: The Serendipity Mindset by Dr. Christian Busch

    Dr Christian Busch makes a rather lofty promise at the beginning of his book: he will reveal how to navigate “the hidden force in the world,” he says. The force is serendipity, which he defines as “unexpected good luck resulting from unplanned moments in which proactive decisions lead to positive outcomes,” phew. Busch says he hopes to “start a journey and, hopefully a movement”. As part of his thought revolution he has created a glossary of terms such as “serendipitor,” which is someone who “cultivates serendipity” and “FOMS,” which stands for “fear of missing serendipity”. The reader can even calculate their serendipity score by answering questions such as “I tend to get what I want from life.”

    The premise of the book is rather ambitious but Busch, who teaches at New York University and the London School of Economics, grounds his suggestions in academic research. For instance, he references the statistical phenomenon, the birthday paradox – the counterintuitive fact that you only need 23 people in a room for it to be likely that someone shares a birthday – to show “we often underestimate the unexpected because we think linearly – often ‘according to plan’ – rather than exponentially (or in contingencies)”.

    In order to demonstrate how people can manifest their own luck, Busch references a study in which two participants, “lucky Martin and unlucky Brenda,” were asked to buy a cup of coffee and sit down. The researchers placed a five-pound note on the pavement outside the entrance. Martin noticed the five-pound note, picked it up and sat down next to a businessman, started a conversation and made friends with him while Brenda did neither of these things and described her trip as “uneventful”.

    Busch also employs plenty of amusing anecdotes to argue his points. To show how people can create serendipity by “connecting the dots,” for instance, he references the drug Sildenafil which was supposed to help cure angina.

    Researchers discovered that it had a surprising impact on male patients: it caused erections. While some would see this as an “embarrassing side effect” it was ultimately marketed as the very successful drug, viagra.

    While Busch occasionally slips into verbose language, the book portrays a clear and helpful message: opportunities are everywhere, seize them. I wrote this review in a coffee shop. I am a typical Londoner and strive to avoid eye contact but I thought of “lucky Martin” when I overheard a man talking about a triathlon club – something I’ve been meaning to do for ages – I spoke to the stranger. With encouragement and advice from the former stranger, I have signed up for my first triathlon and I think that is testament to Dr Busch.

    The Serendipity Mindset: Penguin Life, £14.99

     

  • Exclusive Interview: High Line designer Piet Oudolf

    Exclusive Interview: High Line designer Piet Oudolf

    Piet Oudolf is without question the most famous landscape architect in the world. Iris Spark caught up with the plantsman.

    In every area of life, many people do very well for a period of time. A few reach the top and stay there. But there is only one area I can think of where one person has been so far above the rest for so long. That happens to be gardening. If you ask anyone in the profession who is the best they won’t have to stop and think: Piet Oudolf.

    ‘A rock star,’ says Andy Sturgeon who, with books and television behind him, has himself done passably well. And if you raise his name with anyone in the profession you’ll hear an awed silence, as if they’re turning over with amazement the famous name, and all that it means.

    Oudolf ’s importance – his supremacy even – is partly attributable to the fact that his name is synonymous with a particular movement – the so-called New Perennials – which promoted a new sustainable aesthetic in gardening during the 1970s and 80s. But he’s also a global phenomenon, and sui generis in that respect. He has made public spaces the world over – most notably the High Line and Battery Park in New York, the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park, and Potters Fields in London. His famous home Hummelo, which was open to the public for years until it closed in October 2018, would alone be enough to rank him as a great artist.

    So how did it all begin? The great careers can sometimes seem strangely unpromising at their outset. Oudolf recalls: ‘A long time ago in the 1970s, I turned away from my earlier job in my parents’ restaurant. I was married and didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. I was looking for jobs and eventually came to work in a garden centre at Christmastime in the perennials department. That made me aware of plants.’

    It is a vivid image of the alert drifter, who is waiting for life to come to him – and when it does, seizes life all the more quickly for having waited. ‘I started to buy books and look at plants – that’s how it all started.’

    There were still some practical steps to be taken: ‘I went back to school to get an elementary licence to start a contract company. It was 1975 and we started small with a nursery. We began to sell perennial plants.’ Oudolf owes his stratospheric success in part to having done the hard yards in the less glamorous business of selling plants, but all along there was a radical vision: of a garden that would look good all the year round.         

    He had his share of luck. Gardening was about to take off – and particularly in the UK. ‘In 1980 we travelled to England where gardening was very fashionable with many magazines at that time. And we had the ideal plants so they soon discovered us.’

    Oudolf ’s aesthetic represented a radical move away from the twee decorative garden fashionable at the time. By 2000, the publication of his book Dream Plants for the Garden, showed how far Oudolf had come, not just as a nurseryman but as a thinker. ‘It was translated into Swedish and we had lots of conferences at Kew and elsewhere. We became a close community.’

    To what does Oudolf attribute his success? He tells me it was necessity. ‘We had no choice. We had no money.’ So Oudolf ’s relentless work ethic stems from financial need. Even now, soon to turn 76, Oudolf prefers to work in the morning in his studio, finding that late-night work will interrupt his sleep.

    In 2000 also, Oudolf won the coveted Best in Show gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. But even by that point, people didn’t always understand what he was doing. ‘When I travelled to England, they always called me the nursery man who made gardens, when in fact I was a designer who had a nursery. Some believed in me totally; but other didn’t trust me. It was out of their spectrum.’

    So what sustained him? Oudolf had a vision of a more durable and sustainable kind of garden: he was, in his understated way an evangelical for the ideas he was putting forward. But he also enjoyed the encouragement of a small circle. ‘It was always encouraging when I did something people liked in my circle,’ he says. ‘And people were really taking over my ideas. That was because I was one of the few people that specialised in public spaces so millions of people could see my ideas, which was very stimulating.’

    In fact, when I ask him for his regrets, that turns out to be the only one: he regrets any private work he has done as he knows it hasn’t reached the requisite audience.

    Another turning-point came in 2004, when he was phoned up by James Corner Field Operations who had won the competition to redesign the lower west side of Manhattan: the project that would become known as the High Line. ‘I don’t think even they knew what they would do with it,’ recalls Oudolf. ‘Looking back, it’s great I said ‘yes’ as I was already working on the Battery Conservancy in New York so I thought, ‘I’ll take a look’’. Before Covid-19 struck it was attracting eight million people a year. Oudolf is philosophical about its success: ‘These projects start so small that when you look back you could have said no easily with the same feeling, yes and no were on an equal balance.’

    Does he feel pressure? Quite the opposite. Instead Oudolf uses the question for a remarkable rhapsody about the effects on the soul of gardening: ‘Gardening stimulates the brain: it makes you feel happy. Gardening is a metaphor for so many things. You can find respect in it; or you can play in it. You can find yourself in it, walk into it, discover it. Every day can be different, seasons have a different but continuous journey where the garden changes as you yourself change.’

    Then he pauses, before delivering a kind of punchline: ‘But don’t forget: it’s just fun.’

    So what advice would he give to those starting out in landscape architecture? ‘You can’t do anything without knowing plants – or at least you need someone who knows them. You can’t try and find it out from a book in your office. If you keep on working on that, you’ll create benefits for later.’

    No magic then, just hard work. Today Oudolf has built a recession and virusproof business. ‘The work has changed but I get commissioned now from a distance,’ he explains. ‘I have done two projects at a distance in America, as people know me well now. My plants are quite accurate. If I were ever to slow down it would be my own decision; people want to work with me.’

    Oudolf ’s is predominantly a tale of passion and hard work. ‘I keep working because it’s my life. Every day I do something, I love to go to the office and work. It feels like I’m pensioned but I’m still at work. The clients I work for are specially aware of the time we live in and I think that’s why my planting schemes work so well because they remind you of the wildness people dream on.’

    That wildness has come back to haunt us now, but Oudolf isn’t surprised by 2020. In fact he’s taken it in his stride: it’s what he was telling us about all along.

  • Review: The Power of Learning from Dad by Dr Selva Pankaj

    Review: The Power of Learning from Dad by Dr Selva Pankaj

    While many people planned on writing a book during lockdown Dr Selva Pankaj actually did and the lessons he shares may inspire other people to achieve his level of motivation and success. The Regent Group founder reflects on the wisdom he received from his father while growing up in war-torn Sri Lanka such as “Dad said that plant springs from one seed, so every act of man or woman springs from thought” or “Dad used to say to me, ‘if you get up in the morning and find a wonderful day, be grateful for that’” or “Dad used to say in different words that you should willingly give, and sometimes giving needs to be spontaneous.” While the book bears some of the hallmarks of a self-published memoir, it can be commended for attempting to portray inspiring messages.

    Power of Learning from Dad: Regent Publishing, £10.00

  • Review: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along by Iain Dale

    Review: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along by Iain Dale

     

    By reflecting on Brexit, Trump and Twitter spats, Iain Dale examines why public discourse has become so angry and unproductive. Dale builds a gloriously optimistic road map to a kinder world, centred around the fundamental decencies of human nature. He even provides a simple bullet point list of suggestions from “Never post a picture of your food. No one is interested. Not even your mother” to “Whatever you do, don’t swear.” By his own admission, this is not an intellectual book and at times, like so many journalists, he spends too much time writing about Twitter storms. The richest and most illuminating anecdotes, however, come from his experiences interviewing prime ministers and, surprisingly, his relationship with his parents. This is a book about disagreements, but mostly it’s a book about hope.

    Why Can’t We All Just Get Along: HarperCollins Publishers, £12.99