Services to Biology!

Off to London tomorrow for a day of meetings (Saudi Embassy, Historic Royal Palaces, Defra) before ending up at the Institute of Biology to see my parents being presented with the IoB Gold Medal for services to science. I am very proud that they have carried on sitting on IoB national and regional committees, organising school science competitions for IoB and BAAS and supporting science education for the 20 years+ since they both retired. I hope that I have the same level of energy and commitment come 2026 when it is my time to formally 'retire'.

Mogao caves, Dunhuang

Am back from the Mogao workshop organised by the Getty Conservation Institute, China's SACH and Australia's Department of Environment, Water, Heritage & the Arts. Amazing place, very constructive discussions on managing tourism responsibly at heritage sites and some good contacts made. Photos and more news follow.

Back to school!

I have spent the last three days back in the classroom, starting my own part-time course of study. I have been encouraged by my Faculty to start a Post-Grad Certificate in Higher Education, with the expectation that over the next year I will learn things that will enhance the quality of teaching I (and colleagues) offer our MSc Responsible Tourism Management students at ICRT, Leeds Met.

Forget the year - already I've picked up a number of tips and ideas that I propose to use in the coming weeks - tomorrow at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, next weekend at Dunhuang Academy in China and in early October in workshops with my former colleagues at the Supreme Commission for Tourism and Antiquities in Saudi Arabia.

I guess like many of us I am wedded to PowerPoint, and a presentation this morning gave me some comfort that it is possible to talk to people without the comfort of four or five bullet points on a screen behind you. And who would have thought that Post-its had so many uses!

As I get into the course, I will of course be reading about, thinking about and discussing with colleagues a wide range of issues surrounding the delivery of higher education. I will of course share pearls of wisdom as and when appropriate, but only when I've submitted my essays!

Pets or companion animals?

No matter how you refer to them, they are part of your life and my wife and I are grieving for the loss of our beautiful labrador Sephie, who was put to sleep yesterday at the age of 82 (dog years). Together with her brother Paris, we miss her terribly. When we get her ashes returned, we'll take scatter them on her favourite beach where she spent hours and hours chasing tennis balls, bounding through the waves and barking at the seagulls. Bye bye sweet thing

Responsible Tourism

Two great articles in today's Observer newspaper - one in the colour supplement looking at conflicts between tourism development and traditional Masai lifestyles in Kenya, the other in the main paper looking at the threats tourism brings to fragile World Heritage Sites and including a short interview with ICRT's very own Xavier Font!

Looking back

Hilary and I celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary tomorrow, and (I think) we are both looking forward to turning 50 in the coming months. Time is, inexorably, moving on.

Last weekend we went up to Northumberland to join one of our oldest friends at a party to celebrate her 50th. As well as seeing Karin, we also caught up with a couple of other friends - Michael and Judith - who we have also known for more than 4 decades.

As we chatted over a beer or two in the wonderful microbrewery at Matfen, just off Hadrian' Wall (http://www.highhousefarmbrewery.co.uk/), we reminisced over things that happened as we were growing up in Durham in the 1970s: favourite teachers (Mr Young for Geography, Mr Watson for Physics), great parties (199 Gilesgate in particular), the 4th year school trip to Paris, gigs (Focus at the Mayfair in Newcastle, Domefest http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/durham-dome-festival-1973.html ), former boyfriends and girlfriends. Of course we talked about other things - careers, holidays, children, the achievements of some of our classmates (one climbed Everest a couple of years ago, another recently released his second CD of ragtime and blues guitar) - but we kept going back to our teenage years in particular.

Driving home to Scarborough that evening I started wondering why it is that I still identify so much with the North East of England, despite not having lived there since 1978. I have been lucky in recent years that my consultancy work often takes me to the area, and my position on the Dean's Development Committee at Durham Cathedral means I get to return every couple of months to the ecclesiastical (and former political) heart of the region. And of course we still have family in the city itself.

Perhaps one never fully leaves the place where one has those first, life-forming experiences. I certainly still feel an afinity with the region, its cultural heritage, landscapes and buildings that surpassess anything I feel for other parts of the world I've lived in and visited. And every autumn (and although it's only the 4th September it already feels like autumn) I dig out my old Lindisfarne, Arbre and Jack the Lad albums - there is something comforting about listening to music that has a strong regional identity when the wind is howling and the rain is lashing against the window. What confuses me though is that my family has no roots in the region at all - one side is from the Midlands, the other from London and Norfolk. And keep it under your hat, but I was actually born in Windsor. I only moved to Durham when I was six years old, and by then I had also lived in York and Glasgow.

So what is it that has made me feel this way? A former colleague at Frontline - a weegie in fact - once asked me if I was proud to be English, as he sure as hell was proud to be a Scot. I remember telling Iain at the time that I didn't think of myself as being English at all, but that I was proud to be from the North East, and that being a Geordie was good enough for me. I still feel that way. I have pride in my region: where it has come from; what is has given the world and what it continues to do.

And so back to tomorrow, and our 22nd wedding anniversary. We're off to a restaurant that serves the best food that North Yorkshire can offer (http://www.thestaratharome.co.uk/star_welcome.htm) and that, like High House Farm Brewery in Matfen, provides a great example of how good quality tourism facilities can stimulate local economic development. It's a shame its 30 or so miles outside County Durham's boundary, but I suppose God's own country can't have everything!

Responsible tourism in the Scottish islands?

Hilary and I recently had a wonderful week’s holiday at Gribun on the Isle of Mull, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. Staying with friends in a small cottage (http://www.mull.zynet.co.uk/bacca/) overlooking Loch Na Keal, we had plenty of time to explore the island and visit a wide range of tourist businesses.

I was particularly impressed by the 3-year old mature cheddar available at the creamery near Tobermory, the wonderful food in the Fish Cafe in the old CalMac building on the harbour in Tobermory itself (Balamory to our younger readers) and the tweed jackets and wraps (see picture) made from Hebridean wool and available only at a small weavers shop on a farm at Ardalanish on the south-western corner of the island. The small sculpture park in the woods above Calgary Bay and of course the Abbey on Iona were other highlights.

Almost every business we came across tried its best to use locally-sourced materials or produce, a lot of restaurants and cafes featured organic foods and there were several examples of businesses, such as the Glengorm Estate (http://www.glengormcastle.co.uk/) participating in the Green Tourism Business Scheme (http://www.green-business.co.uk/) – the UK’s national sustainable tourism certification scheme, and a project for which I prepared the feasibility study back in the mid-1990s.

In almost every sense, one could feel that the Isle of Mull is a perfect example of a destination that has fully embraced the principles of responsible tourism. Yet there was a niggling doubt at the back of my mind during the whole holiday and it came to the forefront when I finally realised that with the exception of the crews on the Lochaline and Iona ferries and the weavers at Ardalanish, I barely heard a Scots accent during the whole week.

Most of the shop staff in Tobermory were Polish, the majority of people we met in the Iona Community seemed to be English or American and our bread-making neighbour was Dutch! So has tourism really given rise to a fresh wave of clearances, as Capercaillie suggest in their song “Waiting for the Wheel to Turn” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIK8ChDeWAw)? Have we created another dislocated society just to satisfy our desire for a rural, ‘cultured’ tourism destination? Answers on a postcard please.........

P.S. Whilst away I read Calum's Road, the true story of how one man fought single-handedly to improve access to his small community on the island of Raasay. This inspirational book by Roger Hutchinson is well worth reading, not least because it shows how successive local, regional and national governments have carried on, well into the late 20th century, the clearances initiated by the lairds and sheep farmers in the 19th century.