Tags
BJA, Ethics committee, Home Of Cricket, House of Commons, jewellery, jewellery industry, jewelry, Kimberley Process, Lord's Cricket Ground, michael hoare, N.A.G., NAG, NAG Working Group, national association of goldsmiths, Nicolas Major, UCA
Another stupidly busy week! Starting with lunch with Dr Simon Ofield Kerr, the Vice Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts at their Farnham campus; a walk down memory lane for me as we toured the excellent facilities and as visions of my own student days flooded back. I’ve included a few photographs of the college taken by Rebecca Skeels, a senior tutor in the jewellery and metalwork specialism, whom I first met at the head of a phalanx of prize winning students at last week’s Pewter Live. They will whet the appetite of any budding student designer craft-person now that similar facilities are few and far between.
All day Tuesday spent in the basement at Luke Street brainstorming ideas with Chairman Nicholas Major. Wednesday, up at the crack of dawn to be at the House of Commons in time for breakfast! With the guest speaker, Baroness Royall of Blaisdon, shadow leader of the Lord’s, quite forthright about the shortcomings of government support for small business , and intriguing her audience with the statistic that SMEs make up 99.7% of businesses across Europe.
After breakfast, and a short walk around the corner to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for discussions on the Kimberley Process and some feedback on the inter-cessionary meeting just held under the chairmanship of the USA, before a sandwich lunch at my desk in Luke Street. Ah the glamour of it all!
Thursday, and a second crack-of-dawn awakening, this time to get to London in time for another breakfast meeting; this time with Gaetano Cavalieri, President of CIBJO, who happens to be in town. After breakfast he welcomes the opportunity to pile into a taxi with Simon Rainer and I for a ride across the city to the Luke Street office, where he proves an enthusiastic participant in our joint NAG / BJA Ethics Working Group alongside Greg Valerio and Vivien Johnson. It is an eye opener to hear the shared experience of such a well-travelled and expert group, and gain the support of the World Jewellery Confederation.
A working lunch is followed by a quick getaway. This time the taxi deposits me outside Portcullis House, the remarkable building opposite the Houses of Parliament that swarms like a political ant hill, to take part in a seminar on alternative funding sources. Convened by Anne-Marie Morris MP, who represents the Newton Abbot constituency and chairs the All Party Parliamentary Micro Business Group, the discussion was about the shortcomings of the major lending institutions and the alternatives that are emerging to service the needs of the business community. I will be reporting on this subject in more detail in the pages of The Jeweller, but suffice it to say that in this instance ‘adversity’ truly has been the ‘mother of invention’!
And guess what? We’re doing it all again next week.
Until Then…
– Michael Hoare