The Lady Mayoress and all of the Aldermanic consorts pulled together a host of presents for refugee children. Here she is getting them ready to take to the charity for distribution.

The Lady Mayoress and all of the Aldermanic consorts pulled together a host of presents for refugee children. Here she is getting them ready to take to the charity for distribution.


One of the earliest highlights of being Lord Mayor was hosting the President of South Korea at our State Banquet on 21 November. Imagine my delight when a week later we received two generous boxes of kimchi, some 30 packages.

It turns out that our City community enfolds many kimchi devotees like myself. With alacrity, they were all gone within ten days! Now on to mustard from the French president…

Our last livery function of 2023 was an evening with the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers. As ever, enormous fun, but you might feel this photo needs a caption:
Continue reading “Blowing Air …”
The Worshipful Company of Glovers, never knowingly under-gloved, presented me as Lord Mayor with a seasonal portfolio of manual enhancements: a baseball glove for nostalgia, a golf glove for precision, and barbecue gloves for that most perilous of civic duties—turning sausages without revealing manufacturing secrets. The presentation was a masterclass in applied leather economics: diversification, resilience, and a reminder that, in the City, one must always keep a firm grip—preferably with reinforced stitching.
Continue reading “A ‘Glove Actually’ Christmas”It was great to award The Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI) Certificate in Ethical Artificial Intelligence to our first student, Philip Chamberlain. Philip works in Saudi Arabia but flew to Dubai where we were attending COP 28 to receive the award in person. Rapid development of Al technology means that ethical considerations must be taken into account from the beginning of the design process. Over 1000 students and 125 businesses have signed up so far to understand the ethical and management issues in the deployment of AI. Easy to sign up for the course www.cisi.org.ai.

Yes, a misspelling, should just be mangroves, but got up quite early at a man-ly hour and found myself kayaking in the Abu Dhabi mangroves around 05:30 in the morning.
Continue reading “Man-Groves Or Just Man-Flew”