June has been one of those slightly crazy months that you don't know where it's gone. One minute it was May, the next it's the 26th of June. What also hasn't helped has been the extreme temperatures, making both days and nights that bit trickier.
Anyway, the reason for all that stress was spending €40,000 on an OECD conference I organised on Beyond Growth in the fishing industry.
Over 22 sponsored speakers attended from around the world, plus another 5 I managed to scrape separate funding for together. We spent 2 days in the Edinburgh Business School at Heriot-Watt University talking and essentially writing content for the newspaper article in the Scotsman, a podcast and the youtube video that followed here.
It was actually great fun and totally exhausting from an intellectual and social point of view, let alone logistics and admin, but what it also showed me is that we kind of all accept there is a problem at the moment in the world, but we're not quite sure what to change or how. This symposium was about trying to change the system: if we've built one system (that is all about profit at the expense of the people and planet), then we can build another. But lots and lots of people like the current system - usually because they benefit from it. And that makes it tricky to know how to move forward.
So that's what my job for the next few weeks is: writing it all up.
And I missed an Elton John concert for that!
