Faith in Conservation reissue

Posted on June 18, 2013 by

Faith in Conservation pdfIn January 2003 my husband, Martin Palmer, came home to the little cottage we lived in in the Peak District, and said that as part of the World Bank funding of some projects with his charity he had to write a book about what it was all about. They were going to publish it later that year.

He showed me the first draft of his history of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC), the charity he had set up with HRH Prince Philip eight years before.

It was nice, I said, and obviously it was amazing for the short amount of time he had available. ”But if the World Bank is going to publish it, couldn’t we write a better book, an engaging one, full of stories that people would actually enjoy reading?”

And he smiled, as if that was what he was hoping I’d say, and asked me if I’d put a bit of time into improving it. “And maybe rewriting,” he said hopefully.

By the end it was completely different. And apparently it was actually a bestseller for the World Bank. It was terrific for the charity: the work of religions on the environment is quite a complicated idea to explain and yet the stories about it are brilliant, and hopefully inspiring. It was also nice to hear from people working at NGOs or the UN or new colleagues, or just people who somehow discovered it, that they had “stayed up all night” reading it. That was probably a bit of an exaggeration, but anyway, it was great to hear!

This month we’ve made it into a pretty pdf as an informal reissue. Originally it had lots of background information, but we’ve taken that out, so it’s just the five main chapters. It’s available in .epub (which I can’t quite work out how to load onto this website), or as a pdf. And remember, the bedbug story is mine.

Here’s an extract from the original blurb:

This book, arising from over 20 years experience of working with the world’s major faiths, draws extensively upon joint World Bank and ARC/WWF projects world wide. It shows, through stories, land management, myths, investment policies, legends, advocacy and celebration, the role the major faiths have, do and can play in making the world a better place. The major faiths are the oldest institutions in the world and have survived essentially because they are constantly evolving and changing. There is much to be learnt by newer institutions such as the World Bank and the multitudes of NGOs about how to remain true to what you believe but change and grow as you develop. The book explores issues of climate change, forestry, asset management, education and biodiversity protection and does so using the techniques of the great faiths – storytelling, example and celebration. It reveals a variety of world views and it asks us to see that our personal view may be just one amongst many.”

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A deadline, thundering ahead

Posted on May 15, 2013 by

ImageThis untitled ink and watercolour sketch by the extraordinary Californian artist Martin Ramirez somewhere between 1948 and 1963 seems to sum up my week.

I’m spending every waking hour at a desk with a train of a deadline thundering noisily past the window. This little person doesn’t have toppling bookshelves full of wonderful art books though (and nor do they have a wonderful swiveling chair which arrived on Monday, and which distracted me for several happy minutes, until I felt a bit woozy with all that turning.) I will leave all other kind of writing until I have finished this new book, but I’d like, first, to share a little insight into the color genius Wassily Kandinsky’s practice, from when in 1900 he was an art student, studying in Munich under Franz von Stuck.

Kandinsky was advised to keep the important things at the centre of his attention. Photo: Creative Commons Sytske–R

Kandinsky was advised to keep the important things at the centre of his attention. Photo: Creative Commons Sytske–R

“Sometimes I had to think for a long time about his comments after he had corrected me – but later I almost always found them valid. I had the annoying fault of not being able to finish a picture; he had only to make one comment to put it right. He told me that I worked too tensely, that I grasped what was interesting from the very first and spoilt it by spending too long over the uninteresting part of the work.”

That, I feel right now, could be pretty smart advice.

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A Dinka name for red

Posted on May 4, 2013 by

Medici con l'Africa Cuamm Dinka cattle-1Earlier this week I went to a party where I met a woman from South Sudan. Her name, she said, meant “dark red” in Dinka. Was it common in South Sudan to name people after colours, I asked. It wasn’t uncommon, she said. And is her name just for girls? Yes, she said.

So is there an equivalent, maybe “dark blue” for boys, I asked, happy as always to be chatting along a colours theme. And she started to laugh. And she giggled until little tears formed at the corners of her eyes. “The Dinka are cattle herders,” she said as if in explanation, and giggled again. I didn’t quite understand. “My name is the name for a kind of cattle colour…. (another shudder of laughter)… and no cows are dark blue!” And then we both laughed until we cried at the delightful image of dark blue cows grazing in an orange desert.

It was a lovely, funny reminder of how colour names are caught up in culture. When the Dinka say one word for red they are talking in cattle vocabulary, and when we say some of our own words for colour – beige, say, or scarlet – that word is wrapped up already in so many ideas and associations and shades and sense of taste and fashion, that it is almost untranslateable.

The word "beige" is from the French for undyed wool Photo: WoofBC

The word “beige” is from the French for undyed wool Photo: WoofBC

Beige, incidentally, comes from the French word for undyed wool. And scarlet? Scarlet was once one of the most expensive, softest, fabrics you could buy, and it could be available in any colour. But red was the most expensive dye so no wonder the two became so absolutely associated.

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When Colour could kill and I got addicted to a design website…

Posted on February 20, 2013 by
Washington's verdigris dining room

Washington’s verdigris dining room

Last month the people at that wonderful (and horribly addictive) interior design website Houzz asked me to write a story about colour for their February Colour Month. It was a great chance to remember some of the extraordinary interiors stories I found while researching my Colour book, including George Washington’s insistence that his new dining room should be a particular fashionable green, made from verdigris (interestingly it was a British fashion, and he was writing home from the battlefield where he was fighting against the British in the American War of Independence.)

I took this in Bath's Great Pulteney Street: this wonderful old pillar box has no doubt been repainted many times since it was first installed more than a century ago

I took this in Bath’s Great Pulteney Street: this wonderful old pillar box has no doubt been repainted many times since it was first installed more than a century ago

I also remembered one story which particularly delighted me at the time, (even though I have never had a comment about it from anyone which suggests I might have been a bit geeky) which was about the problems of painting pillar boxes red, or rather of finding a red paint that stayed red and didn’t drift to a cloudy and faded pink. For that one I spent a whole day in the Post Office archives in London, pulling out of storage letters written by angry ex Admirals who said the splotchy colour was unreasonably ugly on their streets in nice places like Tunbridge Wells, and perhaps the Post Office should bite the bullet and paint the boxes battleship grey, which at least would stand the British weather.

There were also some awful tales about how children’s bedrooms in Victorian times were painted or wallpapered in one particular emerald green, which was seen as being jolly for children but which in reality was full of arsenic, and responsible for some horrible deaths and sicknesses. Yet despite that, at a talk given at London’s Royal Academy in the 1870s, there were still a few people who said that they didn’t care about the consequences; it was too marvellous a colour not to use. Here’s the Houzz story.

Posted in Colours, England, interiors, Paint, Stories, USA, verdigris | 1 Comment

Always look on the bright side

Posted on August 13, 2012 by

ImageIn September 1993 I was sent from The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong to cover the first Beijing bid for the Olympics.

I was a rookie news reporter who knew just about nothing about sport, but I had, three and a half months before, been assigned to do a daily “100 days to the Beijing 2000 bid” countdown, with a new locally generated story every day.

After I had interviewed every potential olympic and paralympic athlete in Hong Kong that still left about 93 columns to find, each written with increasing desperation and I am ashamed to say even on one occasion involving cajoling one of the big hotels to make a “Beijing 2000″ chocolate cake. My reward was to be sent to Monte Carlo to cover the vote.

I remember how, on my way out of the airport in Nice, there was a shortage of trolleys. But a nice Englishman suggested I put my bag on his trolley and as he pushed it towards the buses, I asked him whether he too was going to the Olympic meeting. He said he was with the Manchester 2000 bid. When I got onto the press bus and he into another, the British journalists who had been preening themselves on the plane from London looked extremely impressed.

“How did YOU know Bobby Charlton?” asked the man from the Press Association.

Sir Bobby Charlton carried my bag once

Sydney, of course, was awarded the 2000 Olympics. I remember going to the Australian party that night and an Ozzie athlete telling the barman: “don’t worry about the champagne glasses, mate. I’ll just take the bottle.”

The Chinese had cancelled their party int the room next door, but halfway through the evening, I found the Manchester party in a smaller room down the corridor, with Britain’s finest athletes – including Sebastian Coe and Chris Boardman – sitting in thoughtful mood. Sir Bobby Charlton spotted me as I stood peering in at the door. “You again! Come and join us!” he called out.

They poured more wine, and Bobby led the whole team in a rowsing refrain of “Always look on the Bright Side of Life.” I had left Britain two years before, and it was ten years before I would return to live. But I had never felt prouder to be British.

Sometimes you can never know what will happen. And it is, probably, one of the best ways to go through life, even when it’s looking pretty gloomy out there to say, “Well, it doesn’t look like it, but maybe this is for the best after all. Maybe one day we’ll raise a glass to what just happened.”

Of course, Sydney 2000 was brilliant, and the Chinese had their Olympics in 2008 – a lucky number in China – which came at exactly the right time for their athletes and infrastructure. And if only the British had known in 1993 that their time would come too. And it would be a triumph.

Posted in England, Stories, Writing | 1 Comment

Colour, chemistry and scarlet geraniums

Posted on June 8, 2012 by

Nature so effortlessly produces the red in a red flower. Photo: Thomas Tolkien

A reader in Ukraine left a lovely message on this website recently: she said Colour had helped her make connections between art and chemistry, which was terrific to hear. It reminded me of a story I heard a few years ago, which I put into the foreword to the Folio edition of Colour, published in 2009.

The story was told to me by a retired Dutch industrialist, now a philanthropist and writer, who studed chemical engineering at Delft University of Technology in the 1940s. He was given the assignment to create a particular red shade out of petrochemicals. It was such a simple colour yet proved so complicated to reproduce. One day when he got back to his room, feeling depressed because he still hadn’t cracked the problem, he noticed a potted plant on his window sill. In a single day it had produced a perfect flower the exact shade of red he had been tasked to create.

Red geranium petal cells PHOTO: Umberto Salvagnin

“It was many years later when I wanted to find a way to understand what I was searching for in my life that I remembered the red of that flower,” he told me. “And how, where a human being with a sophisticated laboratory had failed again and again, nature had succeeded with just earth, water, air and light. Effortlessly.”

Tum Tiddly-Um

There are echoes of this sense of wonder in my favourite DH Lawrence poem.

Imagine that any mind ever thought a red geranium!

As if the redness of a red geranium could be anything but a sensual experience

and as if sensual experience could take place before there were any senses.

We know that even God could not imagine the redness of a red geranium

nor the smell of mignonette

when geraniums were not, and mignonette neither.

And even when they were, even God would have to have a nose to smell at the mignonette.

You can’t imagine the Holy Ghost sniffing at cherry-pie heliotrope.

Or the Most High, during the coal age, cudgelling his mighty brains

even if he had any brains: straining his mighty mind

to think, among the moss and mud of lizards and mastodons

to think out, in the abstract, when all was twilit green and muddy:

“Now there shall be tum-tiddly-um, and tum-tiddly um,

hey-presto! scarlet geranium!”

We know it couldn’t be done.

But imagine, among the mud and the mastodons

God sighing and yearning with tremendous creative yearning, in that dark green mess

oh, for some other beauty, some other beauty

that blossomed at last, red geranium, and mignonette.

I cannot now remember why that did not find its way into the book, because it was certainly one of the first quotes and poems I remember writing down. But it was ousted at the last minute, perhaps for copyright reasons, by a letter from John Ruskin to Winsor and Newton, and it is good to revisit it now.

Posted in Colours, dye, Red, Stories | Tagged | Leave a comment

A wonderful show of purple

Posted on July 18, 2011 by

Purpura. PHOTO: Traditions Mexico

A reader called Hamid Zavareei has just left a comment on this blogsite to say that there’s a brilliant slideshow about purple on the Traditions Mexico website. And it is wonderful. Really shows the beauty of those remote beaches in Oaxaca, and the extraordinary quality of that most simple of all natural dyes – the shimmer and life of it. I wish I had taken pictures like that when I was there in 2001. But I was too caught up in the whole purpleness of the escapade, in the unlikelihood that we were really there, against the odds, with a man whose name I had read in an academic paper written 10 years before, and that he lived near one particular marketplace. That day we got the only available boat in the village, driven by two teenagers who were actually supposed to be painting it (that’s why it had been left behind). I was also caught up in my desire to stop the two teenagers from hurting the shellfish.

Mexican dyed yearns. PHOTO: Tradition Mexico

I don’t know who the people at Traditions Mexico are, but they have some great photos. And when delving into their earlier albums I found another interesting slideshow from 2007, about cochineal. You can see what the little bugs look like on the opuntia cactuses, and what great buildings (many of them in the city of Oaxaca) were constructed from its profit. You can find that one here.

Posted in Books, Colours, Paint, Stories | 1 Comment