Coburn-Mulligan Gazette 2024

Transition and Change in 2024 

The Coburn-Mulligan family celebrates a year of good times together, consolidation and transition. 2024 seemed to represent handover - new governments, presidents, technologies. Or perhaps it was just us - a new business ended its beginning, a son transitioned to the fourth age of man, a daughter started a path to married life, and long-standing consulting work reached major milestones. We hold our breath for 2025.

Field Study of Tsunami Rebuild 

Helen’s Cambridge Architectural Research project on shrinking cities in in Europe and Japan – funded by the Daiwa Foundation – concluded in March.  She was invited to Japan to participate in a symposium at the Architects’ Institute of Japan on approaches to urban shrinkage. Following the Noto earthquake in Ishigawa province on New Year’s Day 2024 Helen and her hosts Professor Tatsuya Nishino and Dr Haruka Tsukuba organised a field study of reconstruction after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in the area around Sendai. Results will aid plans for rebuilding in Ishigawa.  The symposium was held on 11 March, exactly 13 years after the tsunami – a fitting time for reflection on the traumatic devastation and loss of life in the disaster.

Being Awarded The Award

Risilience won the King's Award for Enterprise for its work on helping large companies cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Last year as it happens. And if you remember, Andrew went to Buckingham Palace as part of it. A year later, the Lord-Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire Julie Spence and her strangely-dressed entourage came to the office to present the award to Risilience. Andrew accepted the glass bowl on behalf of the company and will work hard to earn the goldfish to go in it.

Henry in His Golden State

Henry is continuing his PhD at the University of California Santa Barbara, and enjoying theatre - sorry, theater - productions in his spare time. He moved into a new appartment which he now only has to share with his beloved cat Toffee. His PhD dissertation plan exists in mandala form and he has rotated through his first two chapters. He celebrated a milestone birthday, the same year (and month) that Pulp Fiction was released, so Andrew and Henry took in a commemorative 30th anniversary screening, complete with Jack Rabbit Slim's twist content and the inevitable Royale with Cheese. We should have shotguns for this kind of job.

Visiting Santa Barbara

Unable to lure Henry back to England during the year, Helen and Andrew tracked down their errant offspring in his lair. Had a wonderful visit to Santa Barbara to meet his friends, and see his department's 'Naked Shakes' outdoor production of Much Ado About Nothing (or, to the Shakespearati: 'Noting' - a smutty pun). With cocktails, local wine tasting, a tour of downtown, animatronic dinosaurs, and an unexpected rocket launch to add to the fireworks.

The US Open

We skipped tennis at Wimbledon this year, and instead hit the Arthur Ashe stadium in Flushing Meadows, New York, with Michelle Tuveson, her daughter Katie and friends for the US Open. It was the fulfilment of a longstanding ambition. We watched Daniil Medvedev beat Nuno Borges in straight sets, Jessica Pegula overcome Diana Shnaider, and Francis Tiafoe beating Alexei Popyrin in four sets.  No Pimms but their HoneyDeuce cocktail was a pretty good substitute. Needs a tie-breaker to decide.

Hats to Dye For

Helen’s millinery adventures continued with enrolment in the 2-yr part time HNC course at Morley College, London. Extensive course work including online talks, a group podcast and article - plus the design and completion of numerous hats - has taken large chunks of her time over the past year. However, she now has only (!) her final collection to complete. She has also spent short internships in the millinery studios of Judy Bentinck and Awon Golding. Here she helped create the couture hats for Robert Wun's catwalk show in Hong Kong.

Other milestones included exhibitions at the Luton Hat Works gallery; the end of year show at Morley’s campus in Chelsea; and working in collaboration with housing charity Shelter on Hats for Social Activism.  For this, she dyed a secondhand pair of jeans with natural colourants made from household waste such as pomegranate and avocado skins, sour red wine and iron nails. The resulting sou’wester style hat, together with those produced by classmates, was used by Shelter in a fund-raising display and then sold to raise further funds to help the homeless.

Court Circular

Dr Andrew Coburn and Dr Helen Mulligan are delighted to announce

the engagement of their daughter

Alice Miranda Coburn

to

Martyn Andrew Smith

with the wedding to take place in the summer of 2025

Update on the Happy Couple

For Alice and Martyn, it's been a year packed with short trips - trying snowboarding in Bulgaria, collecting the elusive Parkrun "Z" in Poland (doing Parkruns for every letter of the alphabet), washed-out camping in the Lakes and superbike racing at sunny Thruxton. In between adventures, Martyn has found time to finally submit his PhD thesis on cybersecurity in chemical plants and started a new job with Nuclear Restoration Services Ltd. He also completed Ride London and cycled from London to Brighton. Alice is still working with orthopaedic surgeons, AI in surgery conference, battlefield medicine crash course and plaster casting (the picture of Alice with her arm in plaster is her being used as a training guinea pig - no actual bones broken). She enjoys running with her club Hillingdon Athletics, tackling Endure 24 - a 24 hour relay - for the third year in a row. They are looking forward to 2025, which promises to be a busy and memorable year with the impending nuptials.

Revisiting Roots

The Ival Cafe in Bridge Street, Chester was owned by Andrew's grandfather in the 1950s and 60s. We revisited the site to see how it has all been gentrified. By strange coincidence, when Andrew was working as an architectural assistant in his year out in 1978, he was assigned to work on the Chester Bridge Street refurbishment project. 

Uncle Pete's 80th

Andrew's Uncle Pete threw his 80th Birthday Party, which was attended by the extended family. Pete has become quite the TV celebrity, featuring in several features where he plays the piano at singalongs at the Belong home in Chester, mixing elderly residents with pre-schoolers, including a section in the Royal Carol Service at Christmas. To top off a memorable year, Pete and Yvonne got married - we wish them a long happiness together!

Entertainment

Magical Mystery Tour

This year marked 60 years since Beatlemania swept the US and the moptops started dominating the charts. We went on a voyage of discovery with our Fab Four friends to understand the roots of the musicians who dominated our childhoods. This included visiting the homes in Liverpool where John Lennon and Paul McCartney grew up - and wrote their early songs like 'Please Please Me' and 'I Saw Her Standing There', and the highly-recommended Beatles museum on the refurbished docks, complete with a yellow submarine and reconstructed Cavern nightclub. Then, like the Beatles themselves we transferred to London for the Abbey Road experience and the site of their last concert on the rooftop at Savile Row. In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Bumps and Carnage 2024

Another fine day for our annual riverbank picnic for the May Bumps in June (don't ask) for the University College rowing races. A good day of boating action and cheering bank parties, young visitors, Pimms and croquet.

Edinburgh Fringe

August brought the Edinburgh Festival, and another bewildering variety of shows and creativity, enjoyed with our friends Anne and Simon. This year we 'enjoyed' audience participation, early morning breakfast shows, being locked in a container to experience an air-crash, and long tours of the literary pubs of Edinburgh. 

Business Section

Risilience: Analyst's Report

Andrew's company Risilience had a strong third year, more than doubling their annual sales and adding many large corporations to the client base. Risilience helps clients quantify their financial risk from climate change and plan how to reduce their emissions to improve sustainability. Clients on the books now, have collectively have pledged to remove 924 million tonnes of annual CO2 emissions, more than the greenhouse gas generated by Indonesia, the sixth largest country by emissions. Risilience is hoping to add more clients and nudge this total above a Gigatonne sometime in 2025. In venture capitalist parlance Risilience is now progressing from 'start-up' to 'scale-up'. The team of over 60 employees is a fun community that works hard to try to make an impact.

Andrew has been on the road a lot, in Europe and US, having meetings with clients and prospects to spread the word.

Not all visits are painless. Ambushed by a stack of giant replica Oreos at the headquarters of Mondelez, the owner of brands like Nabisco, Cadbury's, and Toblerone, Andrew slipped and sprained his ankle. He was grateful for the medical care of Saim, Aaron, and Lisa, even though they insisted on getting him to the next sales meeting.

He still hates Oreos. (But we signed up Mondelez...)

Shrinking Cities Group Turns 20

SCiRN, the Shrinking Cities International Research Group co-founded by Helen during her sabbatical in Berkeley, is twenty years old this year!  They gathered in July at an international conference at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques in Paris to celebrate together, and Helen took the opportunity to catch up with school friend Annick.

Sports Section

Red and White Teams Going Strong

There are no trophies given out at Christmas so can't get too excited by leads half way through the season, but it has been a good year to be a Liverpool fan (Andrew) and an Arsenal fan (Helen), catching multiple matches with our various friends. Helen and Andrew even managed to get to the Emirates (Arsenal) stadium together on one occasion - but the visiting Merseysiders hailed from the Everton side of Stanley Park.

Milestones

Brian Smith 1947-2024

Brian Smith, father of Martyn, Alice's fiancé, passed away suddenly during the year. He will be much missed.

Scattering Vera's Ashes at the Singing Ringing Tree

Covid and its lockdowns continue to cast long shadows.  Helen’s aunt Vera Applegate, airforcewoman and secret service agent, died of kidney failure during the epidemic and few relatives were able to attend the funeral.  In spring this year, family members came together to scatter her ashes on her beloved Lancashire moors. The spot we chose was close to the Panopticon, or Singing Ringing Tree, at Crown Point above Burnley. In fine weather, there’s a fabulous view to Pendle Hill and beyond.  When the wind blows, the Tree hums soothing notes in Vera’s memory.

We also laid flowers on the Mulligan and Applegate family graves in Ramsbottom Cemetery, not far away. 

Yarn-Bombing Campaign Enters Second Year

Andrew has continued to faithfully record the crocheted ornaments that adorn the post box in Fen Ditton to mark special occasions, which have appeared throughout the past two years (see last year's Gazette). This year's collection was even finer, commemorating Valentine's day, Easter, Euros football, Olympics, autumn, the postal service itself, and of course, Christmas. Even though it was nothing to do with us, these fine, mad efforts deserve to be recorded for posterity.

And Our General Photo Scrapbook...

An album of more of our 'photos of the year'.

And in case you've lost your way, this is the home page of the Coburn Family: Andrew Coburn, Helen Mulligan, Alice Coburn and Henry Coburn.