The Fields of Flanders

Belgium is also where the bloodiest battles of World War I were fought. The Brians took in the battlefields around Wipers – the Tommies’ nickname for the hellish trenches of the Ypres salient. We paid our respects at the grave of Helen’s great-uncle Joe Shirt at Lijssenthoek military cemetery – one of half a million soldiers who fell in the conflict.

Business Section

Resilient Risilience

This was the fourth year of Andrew's company Risilience (Risk + Resilience, geddit?). Risilience helps companies manage their climate change risk and decarbonize their activities. Client numbers doubled this year, bringing the total amount of annual greenhouse gas emissions they are eliminating to over a gigatonne. But this year saw a backlash against sustainability spearheaded by the Trump presidency, pulling the US out of the Paris agreement and halting climate-protecting regulation, which has caused many companies to pause. We face uncertain times, but the fundamentals haven't changed – fossil fuels cost more than renewables so it makes good business sense to switch to a more sustainable business model. Risilience clients are finding that doing good for the planet is good business.

Ey-Up – It's AI

It's all been about Artificial Intelligence this year. AI has been rapidly permeating daily life and AI companies have reached baffling valuations. The technological advances are jaw-dropping. Risilience is deploying AI tools that promise to greatly improve efficiency and client engagement. But there are also questions about how society will adapt, how the wealth created should be distributed, and how it will change the global economy. Copyright owners are challenging the rights of AI companies to freely consume their works as training datasets. As an author of two published books on risk, Andrew has been invited to join a class action against AI company Anthropic that appears to have consumed published repositories to offer AI-generated risk insights via its popular 'Claude' chatbot. Perhaps if they change its name to 'Andrew' he'll drop the charges.

Urban Shrinkage in Summer School

Helen’s work on Shrinking Cities continued with an invitation to lecture at a summer school for PhD students in Bad Durkheim, Germany, and participate in a short study of flood defences in the Rhine valley. Helen’s paper with Vlad Mychenko – based on previous fieldwork in Stoke-on-Trent – will shortly appear in a special issue on urban shrinkage in the journal Cities.

Write Up on WriteOn 

Helen’s creative writing continues with the Cambridge scriptwriting combo WriteOn.  She’s co-writing the script for a Verbatim production (documentary-style play) with premiere planned for late 2026. She met actor Robson Green at a recent Royal Television Society event to mark the 10th and penultimate season of BBC TV crime drama 'Grantchester'. And…she’s had two short scripts 'Our Paradise' and 'Loving Care' accepted for the Churchill Writers’ Group Anthology for 2025.  Publication details will be circulated when available!

Yarn-Bombing Campaign Continues

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.

Milestones

Remembering Edna

In the spring, it was 10 years since the death of Helen’s mother, Edna.  We gathered several of the cousins together for a visit to the family graves in Lancashire, and a commemorative lunch. We’ve paid respects too at the viewpoints where we scattered the ashes of Helen’s auntie Vera (d. 2020) at the Singing Ringing Tree in Lancashire, and brother Ian (d. 2007) at Wandlebury near Cambridge.

And Our General Photo Scrapbook...

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