Blog 23-29 March 2015 Royal Trinity Hospice
I was appointed the chairman of Trinity Hospice, Clapham towards the end of 2010 and took up my unpaid role on 1st Feb 2011 so I am in my fifth year. As is the case with a charity the job description said 12 days a year but in my first year I did over 80!
On Monday, I joined James Hibbert a Trustee (he runs Dress2Kill) at our warehouse in Balham to better understand our online offering. We have 23 charity shops with a 24th being opened in Gloucester Road next month. They turn over £4m p.a. and provide ten per cent of the annual cost of running Trinity (edging towards £11m). We had an hour there and discussed how our online shop might look. Currently, we'reonly on Amazon and eBay. Online retail has exploded over the past three years and wemust catch this wave!
We then moved on to see our new shop in Gloucester Road, Kensington which is a prime site. We have high hopes it might become our best shop in due course. (Here's hoping). James and I then chewed the fat over a quick lunch at Thomas Cubitt in Elizabeth Street which is one of my favourite eateries though it can become noisy! I was back there in the evening for a quick drink with Regan and Chris from Orchestra, a digital agency, to chat about the business of charities.
Back home, I cooked dinner for Daisy, my daughter, who was staying for a couple of days as she was having a new bathroom put in to her flat.
On Tuesday, I spent the morning in my study working on a couple of projects and seeing whether I could switch my flight to NY in May (I sit on the CITI board at Columbia). I wrote to Lionel Barber, Editor of the FT, suggesting three articles one of which was on concussion. I also wrote to Martha Lane Fox who had a piece in The Guardian (I still read newspapers offline) about a new institute for the Internet. For fiveyears I have been trying to find the funding for an Internet Policy Institute having founded the Oxford Internet Institute in 2000. I put onto my Twitter account the news that EDF had changed my monthly direct debit from £124 to £634 a month without telling me and dropped a much longer email to Radio 4's You & Yours. In the evening, we took my daughter to 11 Pimlico Road for supper.
Wednesday was a revelation. Wearing my chairman's hat at NISE NHS, John (Dr) Stedman, my CEO, and I went to see Lord Darzi at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington (10th floor) where he runs the Institute of Global Health Innovation. We also met Dr Oliver Keown his Private Secretary. We had what I would call a blow out meeting where we traded ideas for 45 minutes. Later, I connected Dallas Pound (CEO), Clare Montagu (COO) and Dr Sam Lund (MD) at Trinity Hospice with their Helix research work. I had lunch at Thomas Cubitt with David Hooper who has been my libel lawyer for aeons. He is better known as the brains behind us publishing Spycatcher back in 1986 when I was a publisher and board director at William Heinemann. On Easter Sunday, Radio 4 will have a programme connecting all the players, including Lord Robert Armstrong of Economical with the Truth.
Thursday was illuminated by first a call and then the official letter from the Cabinet Office telling us that Buckingham Palace had approved our name change from Trinity Hospice to Royal Trinity Hospice in time for our 125th anniversary (we are the oldest hospice in England) next year. I dropped a quick note of thanks to HRH The Duchess of Cornwall’s office (she’s our Royal Patron) and then sent emails to our trustees. Naturally, I talked to Dallas and we agreed to think it through overnight.
Our trustees were to put it mildly thrilled……I had started the process of setting out our case to be Royal Trinity three years ago and patience (unusual for me) has borne fruit.
I always start Friday with a meeting with Dallas Pounds at her office in Trinity Hospice in Clapham just north of the common. Naturally, Royal Trinity was our top agenda item and we agreed to tell as many staff personally on Monday and call or email others not on duty or in our shops. Nigel Parslow, MD, of Harvey Nash and Samantha Johnson, also from HN, came for a visit. Nigel and his team had written a rather good booklet entitled The Changing Shape of Non-Executive Directors which I had shared with my Board. They stayed for an hour and we swapped a number of suggestions. I then chaired our Shops Board. We discussed where the pop up market was, staffing, Christmas, new shops and much else. We turn over north of £4m and the contribution to our bottom line is over £1m. Each year we have to raise more and more to keep Trinity open and our shops and fund-raising teams are simply the best. As ever, I exhort them to do more!! We receive just on £3m from the NHS and so have to find £8m p.a. to remain free and open to all.
Over the weekend, I watched my first piece of television for months…..Coalition on C4 about the crazy five days after the 2010 General Election. I thought the PM should have resigned immediately after the result because Cameron’s side had won the most seats and votes. Had Brown gone that day we would not have had this calamitous coalition. Ah politics, I do miss it! I also went to see The Second Marigold Hotel which I loved.
Books read in March Isis by Michael Weiss & Hassan Hassan Future Crimes by Marc GoodmanBlair Inc by Beckett, Henke & Kochan The Patient Will See You Now by Eric Topol The Hot Zone by Richard Preston The Internet is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen Being Mortal by Atul Gawade Battle of the Titans by Fred Vogelstein The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams
Films in March Still Alice Second Exotic Marigold Hotel
Exhibitions ?in March Rueben’s @ RA Alexander McQueen @ V&A Mackintosh @ RIBA
Lecture & Meetings APPG Space & Technology on Fast Broadband @ Parliament FISP meeting on a Manifesto for Tech 2015+ @ Army & Navy Club Sport & Digital Meet Up @ Hospital Club Digital Methods in Epidemiology @ SOAS Book Trust @ Battersea Design Council @ Islington
Sport in March England v Scotland @ Twickenham England v France @ Twickenham MCC Dinner @ Lord’s