Living on the edge

Hong Kong, with its towering skyscrapers, bustling streets and scenic islands is more than just a special administrative region of China; it’s a melting pot of cultures, traditions and beliefs. In some ways Lo Ting, Hong Kong’s distinctive mythical creature, which supposedly still resides in family groups on and around the island of Lantau, is an apt emblem for the region. Being half-man, half-fish, a Lo Ting is able to straddle and survive in two environments, much like Hong Kong itself has thrived as a crossing point between the East and the West. But there is more to Lo Ting than its ability to cope in challenging conditions. I think it has much to tell us about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and the way we treat and accept others.

Jimmy Keung’s Lo Ting sculpture that was commissioned by Oscar Ho
for the 1997 exhibition at the HKAC – Photo by Ilaria

Lo Ting’s are first mentioned by a civil servant in the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE). He was compiling a census of the region and gives descriptions of an amphibious species living near Lantau. By the Qing Dynasty there is an explanation as to how the Lo Ting evolved. It is claimed that initially they were warriors who fought for General Lu Xun (still a popular character in martial art films and manga), to try and overthrow the Jin Dynasty. Lu Xun led an unsuccessful rebellion in 410CE. His army was forced to flee from revenging imperial authorities – this resulted in their hiding and living “little better than beasts”, partially on land and partially at sea around the southern islands. Gradually these people became viewed as being amphibian and hence the legend of the Lo Ting began. Lo Tings lived secluded lives at the margins of society. Supposedly, in addition to relying on fishing, they became salt producers on Lantau; until, in 1197CE, the Song Emperor decided to nationalise salt production, resulting in a massacre of salt manufacturers during which most Lo Ting and significant numbers of the Tanka boat people were killed.

Linking the Lo Ting to the Tanka is significant. The Tanka still exist, a declining community, some of whom continue to live in their fishing boats on the shores of Hong Kong and neighbouring regions. For centuries they have been persecuted by those in power and the wider public. Colloquially referred to a “sea gypsies”, in the 18th century they were banned from marrying outside their community or from living onshore; the land-dwelling farmers fought them to prevent them from getting land; and more recently their fishing-based lifestyle has been impacted by stringent environmental laws and government policy.

People tend to overlook or reject those whom they see as different from themselves and whom they believe could potentially be a threat or awkward to interact with. All too often, we make assumptions. The colour of a person’s skin tells you nothing about their religious beliefs. The fact that someone is sixty does not indicate that they are ready to retire or wish to slow down. A fatter than average person is not de facto lazy. Youth does not prevent someone from being an excellent manager. Being female doesn’t make you a bad driver. Being male doesn’t make you a bad nurse. It is very easy to stereotype. We form opinions thanks to our own upbringings and experiences, but by excluding people or groups we diminish our own and our organisations’ ability to innovate and progress. So often the best ideas can come from an unexpected sources – frequently the new joiner to a company questions why things are done in a certain way and proposes a new and better approach – listen to them; an individual joining from a different industry can make suggestions that will enhance a product or way of communicating (virtual reality, initially developed for gaming, is now being used for training in medicine and industry and AI is transforming Finance and smart analysis of data is enhancing education and the outcomes for children). Rather than marginalising those who stand out as being different, we should welcome them and celebrate what they have to offer (ideas, experiences, aspirations) for the benefit of us all.

Despite their mistreatment, Hong Kong is indebted to the Tanka. Many people don’t know it, but Hong Kong gets its name from them – when the British first arrived in the 19th century they asked a group of indigenous people on fishing boats what the place was called. “Hong Kong” was the reply – Hong Kong are the Tanka words for “fragrant harbour.” Their language is now almost obsolete, their culture dwindling, but the name Hong Kong lives on.

This restless festive season - Day 30

Sunday 30th December 2018

30 teeth can be found in an adult cat's mouth. Cats have 4 canine teeth. The canine teeth, used for
catching and killing prey, sit in beds of sensitive tissue that let the cat feel what it is
gripping. Kittens develop 26 needle-sharp milk teeth which are replaced by adult teeth at 6 months.

I hope you are enjoying a peaceful and relaxing weekend - the last one of 2018. Things are calm at my end - despite a few heated discussions about the seating plan for my son's 21st party. I must confess, not counting the current debate about the party, much of this year has been challenging. We have achieved a lot at work and I have a wonderful and award winning team, but family matters have been tough. I won't miss 2018 - it has had some scarring and serious low points/complications and I dread the early months of 2019, as the dust has yet to settle. Perhaps that is what inspired be to this year's theme for the Advent Blogs - Heartache, Hopes and High-fives. Roll on the high-fives...

Our contributor today is Paula Aamli, a highly intelligent and inspirational lady who has already done much to make the world a better place. She deserves a high-five just for being who she is. She has a First Class Degree from Oxford in Modern History under her belt and a Masters with Distinction from Hult Ashridge, in Sustainability and now she is a doctoral candidate on the Executive Doctorate in Organisational Change, at Hult Ashridge, where Steve Marshall is her supervisor. Her topic of interest is around organisational change to support more sustainable business and personal lives and she is very interested in creative methods (hence the photography and the poetic writing below - NB all the photos are Paula's own work, except for one taken which was taken by her partner). Given Paula's background one perhaps should not be surprised at her area of academic study...she has worked within the Not for Profit arena as an Appeal Manager for Christian Aid and then the Development Director for The Brightside Trust when the charity was just establishing itself, before moving into Financial Services.  She has championed accountability and ethical conduct at HSBC for many years as well as helping people within the bank to develop and grow. Since June she has been the Head of Governance and Control for the UK Private Bank, working directly with the CEO and the top team. Paula is described by those who know her as dynamic, energetic and possessing a ruthless attention to detail. I am sure that you will enjoy her post. Paula is on Twitter - her handle is @paulettya.

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Photo credit S. Rosbottom

The shape of this year’s holiday break

For the second year in a row, I’m spending nearly full two weeks over the Christmas break tucked amongst the creaky drafts of an old house that stands braced on a hillside overlooking Carmarthen Bay.

I have hungered for this retreat from city crowds and work deadlines, but now that it is here, I resist the slowing that this place calls for in me, with its large horizons and small settlements, the subtle beauty of its muted colour palette, the grey-greens and grey-blues and grey-browns that offer unblinking contrast from the neon brights of Regent Street, where my everyday commute-path so recently took me.

I – did not – expect – this.

I expected to transition effortlessly, gracefully, into unscheduled expansiveness.

It was, after all, whilst hidden here last year that I started really paying attention to how it felt to take time away from my blue-light screens and nerve-end-twitchiness of constant deadlines and to drift, aimlessly purposeful, through that large, cold, damp sand-landscape. Reader, it felt great.

I found a dawning conviction that spending deep, unhurried time in nature changes something in humans (in me!) that desperately needs shifting if we are to move away from lifestyles based on casual, unthinking gouging of the environment that we depend upon and which sustains us. 

As a wanna-be organisational change practitioner, I also had a conviction-that-looks-a-lot-like-a-hope that this change can (and does and will) lead to better decision making, better outcomes and better quality of experiences as individuals and networks and communities and organisations.

So I was looking forward to resuming last year’s cozy communing, but with the benefit of the work and wondering and wandering that I have lived in the meantime.  Apparently it doesn’t work like that; seems that you can’t start where you were, that you have to start where you are.

Where I am, this year, is finding that I unexpectedly miss the un-picturesque little loops of paths, tracks, parks and pavements that I have strolled and traipsed and marched through in my corner of East London in the last twelve months. And thus it came to pass that over Christmas 2018, I have called upon my most precious, efficacious super-power, gifted to me by my Irish great-grandmother by way of my Welsh mother: the gift of bloody-mindedness.

Reader, it has been less of a joy and more of a grind, but I have walked, faithfully, every day, anyway. In the spirit of “eat-your-veg/do-your-homework”, I’m betting on persistence paying off in the long run.

Beach-side high fives

Every day, then, as the sea-water creeps back from the land, revealing the wide expanse of the low-tide beach, I have donned wool socks and plastic shoes, a rucksack or shopping bag, and of course, my faithful iphone to tick off the footsteps (if my app doesn’t track a walk, did it even happen?) and set out. Sometimes I walk alone and sometimes S comes with me. Our front door to St Katherine’s Island and back is a solid 4 miles but can only be completed when the tides permit.

It has become an informal family tradition that we pick up plastic litter from the shoreline as we walk. Every time, I marvel at how an apparently pristine beach yields up so much rubbish once you start tuning in to looking for it. I also bless our fortune, with every footstep, that being situated on a tucked-away corner of the planet that is not opposite the sloppy sprawl of some great city, we are chasing the detritus left by tourists and trawlers but do not have to contend with the plastic avalanche of so many consuming bodies. [But the ghost of the Sea Empress oil spill whispers in the air as I type this.]

Every day has been a walk just for the sake of walking; every day except one. Christmas Eve was my dash-of-shame into town, alone, for some last-minute Christmas presents, but the miles still called me.

I shrugged the loaded rucksack onto my shoulders, clinking with Christmas gin. A large shopping bag in each hand, I set off for the western edge of the beach, one and a half (ish) miles away. I trudged across damp sand, bags flapping when the wind occasionally caught them. Tenby “mist” settled on my face and on the shopping bags as the lowering cloud stooped down to touch the beach – but the bags weren’t heavy and the presents seemed to be coping ok with the gentle overlay of rain.

It’s a long and, relatively speaking, featureless expanse of beach that serves as part of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, after walkers drop down from the clifftop path on Giltar Point. People travelling in opposite directions can see each other approaching across the full length of the beach, slowly expanding from small dark distant specks to fill out human stature as we finally draw towards passing each other.

An older couple were walking towards me, well-kitted-out for the weather conditions. Mindful of the season, I made eye contact as we reached a passing point; then, to my reserved, British astonishment, the lady started towards me, smiling. “I just wanted to say”, she said – “what a surprising, lovely sight you make. A lady who has done her Christmas shopping and is carrying it home along the beach, looking for all the world as though she is heading off into the middle of nowhere. Well done, you.”  A smile and a brief exchange of Christmas greetings and she is gone. “High five!” she didn’t add – but I can see how, in another context, that would have been the obvious sentiment.

It was a memorable moment for me, not just given the shock of experiencing two British strangers finding it in themselves to chat, unprovoked, to each other, in public, but also because I was genuinely taken aback to be seen as doing anything out-of-the-ordinary. Just me, just walking home. Just carrying my hasty last-minute shopping because I’d been too disorganised to do it sooner and bring it down by car. Of course, I had the advantage of knowing that there’s a village just beyond the sand dunes at the non-town end of the beach (assuming that the lady I was speaking to isn’t a Pembrokeshire local).

Hope and heartache mingling on the sea edge

I suppose the other thing of note here is that – chore or otherwise – I don’t really experience the beach as empty or ‘other’. This beach seems full – teeming with sea-life, sure, but also full of hints and vestiges of the long life-story of the earth that has created it.

I look at the sand of the beach and I remember the long ages that ground rocks to make it – and the longer ages before that where the rocks themselves were formed from the ancient life of the more ancient seas. I see generations of living things cycling through millennia to this moment, and cycling away from now into a vast, remote final future.

I find myself to be tiny and brief in context of this tremendously enduring earth history, which is immensely humbling of course, but also strangely comforting, somehow, that after all that has happened – that human consciousness exists at all, that I, specifically I, have arrived into my moment in the story, along with my friends and family, community and nation, and the wider nations that surround us.

Our problems are significant, but the earth will endure (until, in the very far distant future, it doesn’t). Maybe there are ways I can’t see yet that will enable humans to endure and continue along with it.

The edge of the world (January 2015)

I went down to the edge of the world to watch the passing of this age.

The sun spills amber liquid on the wet cleg underfoot.

I feel the hug of the ground.

I hear the soothing shrieks of feathered sentinels overhead.

I see the end of days written on the rock teeth that still seek to consume,

Clutching at Caldey in the maw of the sea.

I see a time where the stars burn up and the clouds sigh into nothing,

For there is no more rain, and the pale blue atmosphere has boiled into the black.

I see how vast my now-beach is, and how tiny,

wrapped around with waves, and cliffs, and birds, and stones, and shells.

It contains the tiniest moment

And yet the whole big universe is here with me, also

Waiting on the beach for night to fall.

All together, we wait – witnessing.

[As stated above, all the photos are Paula's unless otherwise indicated.]

Bouncing Back

Day 38 (Saturday 7th January 2017)

38 patients were tested for 26 weeks in April 2016 in Denmark, in a drugs trial that appears to

offer the first breakthrough in treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers. Imaging showed that Liraglutide 

maintained the brain metabolism of sufferers while in those given a placebo it decreased.

We are a week into 2017 - I hope the New Year is treating you well. 

Today's post comes from Helen Green, the Director and founder of Orient8 Consulting Limited, a business that focuses on improving performance and which helps individuals to shift their focus from "what is" to "what could be". Helen herself is an excellent executive coach and able to help individuals and teams, regardless of the challenges - check out the client testimonials on the Orient8 website. Helen has a background in Sales and Marketing for FMCG organisations and she has a genuine interest in understanding what drives behaviours. She has an MsC in Organisational Change, a Postgraduate Certificate in Executive and Business Coaching, a Systemic Team Coaching Certificate and a BSc in Psychology, having studied STEM subjects at A Level. She is well-grounded, commercial, analytical and empathetic. You can connect with her on Twitter (her handle is @orient8you)

It should come as no surprise that Helen is a thinker - her below post is full of observation and all the pictures in Japan were taken and provided by her. It is a piece that will make you, amongst other things, think about power, impact, hope, shame,  war, grief, harm, conscience, courage and resilience. It is personal but simultaneously universal. Thank you Helen.

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Bouncing back

“Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes.” Psychology Today

New Growth Sprouting Up Through the Ashes of the Spring Prairie Burn by Madison Guy

When I was contemplating what to write for this year’s series, I thought about reviewing my year with its wild ups and downs, but one memory kept coming back to me. I was held, transfixed by what I saw on a holiday to Japan this Autumn, in the delightful city of Hiroshima. It is this that I feel compelled to write about.

My Lonely Planet guide states “Leafy Hiroshima, with its wide boulevards and laid back friendliness, is a far from depressing place. Present day Hiroshima is home to a thriving and internationally minded community and it’s worth spending a couple of nights here to experience the city at its vibrant best.”

We didn’t have a couple of days, unfortunately, just a few hours before we boarded the bullet train back to Kyoto, but in the short time we had there I experienced it as a lively, attractive and friendly city.

Our limited time was largely focussed on the history of the city.

The word Hiroshima will be forever associated with the atomic bomb dropped on the city in 1945.

On the way to the Peace Memorial Museum, we passed the Atomic Bomb Dome. It was built in 1915 by a Czech architect and was the Industrial Promotion Hall until the bomb exploded almost directly above it. Everyone inside was killed, but the building was one of the very few left standing near the epicentre. The shell has been preserved as a memorial and in 1996 it was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site.

In the photograph I took that day, you can see the Atomic Bomb Dome and also the kids walking by. It was a school day and very much business as usual in 2016 Hiroshima.

Matsui Kazumi, Mayor of Hiroshima, wrote these words in the Peace declaration written on August 6^th 2016,

“1945, August 6, 8:15am. Slicing through the clear blue sky, a previously unknown ‘absolute evil’ is unleashed on Hiroshima, instantly searing the entire city. Koreans, Chinese, Southeast Asians, American prisoners of war, children, the elderly and other innocent people are slaughtered. By the end of the year, 140,000 are dead.”

It is estimated that 350,000 people were directly exposed to the bomb.

We visited the Peace Memorial Museum along with a few hundred tourists and probably a couple of thousand Japanese schoolchildren and their teachers.

We silently filed through the various rooms depicting the horrors. The schoolchildren looked at the images and artefacts without saying a word. I cried.

A few moments later, I caught the eye of another tourist. She looked as I felt, shocked, sad, raw. She said something like “it’s terrible. And the kids ………. they are being exposed to all of this……..” I nodded and with anger rising said “and those who really need to come and see this will never come.”

The last image in the main part of the Museum was this one. I stood and stared at it for a very long time.

The words are these; “That Autumn in Hiroshima where it was said ‘For seventy-five years nothing will grow’ new buds sprouted. In the green that came back to life among the charred ruins, people recovered their living hopes and courage”.

Seeds from a tree damaged by the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima have been successfully grown in an Aberdeen park.

Dictionary of the Wind

Day 24 (Thursday 24th December 2015, Christmas Eve)

24 full-members is the maximum number of "Companions" permitted to belong
to the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the pinnacle of the British Honours system
(after the Victoria and George Crosses). It is the world's oldest order of knighthood in continuous
existence (it was founded in 1348). Selection and appointment to the Order can only be given
"by the Sovereign's pleasure" and is limited to recipients from the UK and Commonwealth realms.
Currently there is one Lady-Companion and one Knight-Companion is Australian,
all the others are British. At present there are 3 vacancies.

Twas the night before Christmas and all 'cross the web the people were stirring in festive cheer and good ebb. 

I am delighted to introduce you to a consistently popular contributor to the Advent series, Neil Usher; his often intriguing and always thought-provoking pieces have become part of the annual tradition. Neil is an accomplished wordsmith and this year's piece is no exception. He is employed as the Workplace Director at Sky. He is an experienced and globally recognised property expert who works on the cusp of workspace, facilities, HR, social business environments and approaches. I strongly recommend his blog at www.workessence.com and you can follow Neil on Twitter at @workessence. His evocative Advent post touches on what we lose if we are solely submerged in the coal-dust grime of our working lives. I love his imaginative use of self-created language to evoke his walk to work.

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I walk to work.  The place I work. To do the work I do.

I have been privileged to the changing of the seasons from the vantage of soft shoe and rucksack, traceless but for a crease in the breeze, the moment whispered in a language shared only with what I see. We all once understood, but have allowed ourselves to be overrun. We may never know this imperceptible extinction.

Beyond a short bruth of concrust from which springs a magnolia, buckled for all but a half-moon of exuberant indulgence, 

I turn past the cracked and fraying Manor that once earled the brickdusted steps and thrust its brittle fingers into tithed commons.

Ancient Strip Lynchets raking the hillside of Manor-owned land

The esklarch rips and stipples the shadows of its clopped-hooved memory, I hear barked, clipped insistence and obliging servitude, the rattle of kettle and reckle of an open hearth, the unquestioning solidification of caste. 

The brittle chill of stone and the damp leuge of heavy winter cloth stifle and suffocate.

As the chime distances, the whelf winds through shillow and copse, crassle underfoot and the wrappling and sackle of brush as I reassure myself of being alone. Minutes pass as my anxiety settles, the felt pad of my heart beating a rhythm to the corntide.

A solitary rheelip breaks the spell, like soft glass. While we feel calm in the ease of our escape, nothing ever settles.

Larshligt bursts at the yawn of the delsh, swayed and unbladed, straddled by the acrsweep of eaglebees and staccato sheffle of the swallow-wisps, nuzzling and peckling from elfswand, hacklemoss and pluise. My stride slows, slows, stops. I could root, stem, branch, I could twine and rupple. It may just be a breath-worth. It may be a lifetime.

The canal veins at the boundary, quarls slowly brushing the brittle banks. 

Hawkwellows whisk-eye the pulfweeds for threshle and lespe. 

Little moves, but moves enough.

As the road opens, my breathing stiffens, the canopy lifted. I return to the common language of normality in which we are all misunderstood.