Meeting Management

The morning meeting went on for far too long today - the diagonal stripes of sunshine across the table gradualy strightened to the vertical.

Inbetween mentally undressing the young and very beautiful and sharp and cool and lovely and cruel and ambitious project manager, taking the occasional note, and slurping Coke, the passage of the sun across the table and the diamond sharp winter landscape through the slats in the blind reminded me of John Betjeman's poem Upper Lambourne:

Up the ash-tree climbs the ivy,
Up the ivy climbs the sun,
With a twenty-thousand pattering
Has a valley breeze begun,
Feathery ash, neglected elder,
Shift the shade and make it run

Shift the shade toward the nettles,
And the nettles set it free
To streak the stained Carrara headstone
Where, in nineteen-twenty-three,
He who trained a hundred winners
Paid the Final Entrance Fee.

Leathery limbs of Upper Lambourne,
Leathery skin from sun and wind,
Leathery breeches, spreading stables,
Shining saddles left behind
To the down the string of horses
Moving out of sight and mind.

Feathery ash in leathery Lambourne
Waves above the sarsen stone,
And Edwardian plantations
So coniferously moan
As to make the swelling downland,
Far-surrounding, seem their own.

Great stuff. And she didn't say 'impact' once.