Kimchi

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 large boxes of kimchi, some thirty-plus 2kg 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…

There was some very kind Korean news coverage as well. And if you’re in Seoul, the Museum Kimchikan has moved to even better premises as it expands (ferments?).

A ‘Glove Actually’ Christmas

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.

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First Off The AI Chocks

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.

Work, Work, Work!

Whilst I’m known to claim that emails from my portable devices emanate from “one of my work/life imbalance machines”, I do believe that if you don’t enjoy your job most of the time, you’re being unfair to yourself. So despite the hairshirt cries accompanying the demanding Lord Mayoral visit programme, 25 countries over 100 days of travel, air miles almost exactly 100,000 – I can only try and pretend that mixing cocktails in the skies on the way to the UAE isn’t fun.

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