I have been traveling for the past two weeks. It has been an exhilarating, stimulating, gratifying time. In Scotland, Germany, London, and here in Bath people have been extraordinarily kind to me.
On Tuesday (29 Nov.) James Delingpole – whose Watermelons book explores the global warming debate in a far more entertaining manner than my own – bought me dinner and invited me to take part in an hour-long podcast.
Today, over lunch, I met the redoubtable Christopher Booker who has been writing, for years, about our human tendency to tell ourselves scary stories.
Yesterday I spent much of the day on trains whizzing through the English countryside (which remains green and lovely even in early December), partly so that I could spend a few hours with Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen. She is a pioneer who was thinking critically about the Kyoto Protocol long before I ever gave such matters a moment’s thought – and at a time when it was full-blown heresy to do so.
On Wednesday I was one of a panel of people who had the privilege of addressing a meeting attended by members of the public as well as some UK parliamentarians.
I was a bit disappointed with my performance. Having neglected to double-check the allotted length of time, I found myself trying to cover 25 minutes worth of material in 15 minutes. Additionally, my PowerPoint presentation wasn’t entirely compatible with the software on the laptop in use that day. Some of my slides got rather mangled. In one case, a slide containing five quotations displayed only the first quote. Those difficulties knocked me off my stride a little. Which is why the above cartoon, by Josh, has cheered me considerably. Maybe things weren’t as bad as I thought :-)
Josh – a truly lovely human being – did a load of sketches that day. See them all here.
Tomorrow I return to Canada. A great deal of e-mail has accumulated in my inbox in recent weeks. I hope to catch up on it soon.
