·
April 1989: Margaret Thatcher is in her last year as UK
PM. The Berlin Wall has less than 6 months before it is toppled. In his second
year at university a young Piers attends a lecture on public health and learns
that 30,000 people die each day from diseases that can be avoided through
better sanitation. I was so taken with this fact that I wrote in my diary that
my life-goal would be to work in the water sector, and in particular at the
dirty end of the pipe; in sludge. Note my youthful naïvety, my
blistering arrogance and my staggering confidence. This has now evolved into
the more refined and experienced naivety, arrogance and confidence of a middle
aged man. Note also, with slight sadness, that unlike any normal teenager, at
19 I was busy ‘setting life goals’ and writing early Notes from Piers
(just no one read them).
· September 1996: Tony Blair is still on the opposition benches. The Queen Mum is still doing public engagements. No one has heard of Al Qaida. Piers chairs his first session at an international conference on sludge, in Tokyo. While there I met with a group of PhD students from Imperial College (including a young Bill Barber). Over that week I attended my first Karaoke event, and (importantly) I realised that others were better placed to actually make the new discoveries that were going to build a better world for sanitation. My role was to facilitate new technologies, not to invent them.
· Last week: Charles Kennedy, the only senior UK MP to strongly object to the second Iraq war, passed away unexpectedly. Sepp Blatter resigned amid the growing FIFA crisis. Piers attended a meeting with Antaco, a young and very exciting start-up company that has developed a ground-breaking technology that could revolutionize the sludge sector. Over the past 20 years I have had the honour of working with literally hundreds of companies like Antaco. I still get a tingling childish delight from digging into the technical details and working with the management to connect the dots on what their particular technology can really do. It never fails to delight. Humans are gloriously inventive when it comes to sludge.
· Next month: George Osbourne will announce his emergency budget. It is unlikely anyone will be happy. Greece will almost certainly drop out of the Euro. I will attend the latest sludge conference (SludgeTech, June 29-July 1st, see attached flyer) where the latest advances in the world of sludge will be debated and reviewed. A lot has happened since that public health lecture back in 1989. The latest World Health Org figures show that about 10,000 people a day still die of diseases related to poor sanitation. It is an improvement, but it is still not good enough. I will be chairing a panel with my old friend from Tokyo, Dr Bill Barber. He is now a god in world of sludge. I confess to be a little envious.
· The future: Cars will drive themselves. We will all live to 100+. World leaders will be non-white and have a uterus and it won’t be newsworthy. Sludge will still be an issue. Wherever there are humans there will be sludge. Back in the 1990s Mars Pet-Foods ran a research project to develop a dog food that could be 100% assimilated by the dog, thereby removing the need for it to defecate. They abandoned the project after learning that pet owners apparently like to judge their pets health by examining the faeces. I suspect the same applies to humans. We will always have a sewage sludge.
· September 1996: Tony Blair is still on the opposition benches. The Queen Mum is still doing public engagements. No one has heard of Al Qaida. Piers chairs his first session at an international conference on sludge, in Tokyo. While there I met with a group of PhD students from Imperial College (including a young Bill Barber). Over that week I attended my first Karaoke event, and (importantly) I realised that others were better placed to actually make the new discoveries that were going to build a better world for sanitation. My role was to facilitate new technologies, not to invent them.
· Last week: Charles Kennedy, the only senior UK MP to strongly object to the second Iraq war, passed away unexpectedly. Sepp Blatter resigned amid the growing FIFA crisis. Piers attended a meeting with Antaco, a young and very exciting start-up company that has developed a ground-breaking technology that could revolutionize the sludge sector. Over the past 20 years I have had the honour of working with literally hundreds of companies like Antaco. I still get a tingling childish delight from digging into the technical details and working with the management to connect the dots on what their particular technology can really do. It never fails to delight. Humans are gloriously inventive when it comes to sludge.
· Next month: George Osbourne will announce his emergency budget. It is unlikely anyone will be happy. Greece will almost certainly drop out of the Euro. I will attend the latest sludge conference (SludgeTech, June 29-July 1st, see attached flyer) where the latest advances in the world of sludge will be debated and reviewed. A lot has happened since that public health lecture back in 1989. The latest World Health Org figures show that about 10,000 people a day still die of diseases related to poor sanitation. It is an improvement, but it is still not good enough. I will be chairing a panel with my old friend from Tokyo, Dr Bill Barber. He is now a god in world of sludge. I confess to be a little envious.
· The future: Cars will drive themselves. We will all live to 100+. World leaders will be non-white and have a uterus and it won’t be newsworthy. Sludge will still be an issue. Wherever there are humans there will be sludge. Back in the 1990s Mars Pet-Foods ran a research project to develop a dog food that could be 100% assimilated by the dog, thereby removing the need for it to defecate. They abandoned the project after learning that pet owners apparently like to judge their pets health by examining the faeces. I suspect the same applies to humans. We will always have a sewage sludge.
I made a good career
choice. It may not be glamorous but it sure is fun.
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