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WITSIES AROUND THE WORLD
ABOVE: “SÃO PAULO IS J O H A N N E S B U R G ’ S S I S T E R C I T Y. I H AV E NEVER SEEN T WO CITIES THAT ARE SO ALIKE, FROM THE EXCITEMENT AND VIBRANCY TO THE JACARANDA TREES” R I G H T: M I CH A E L S E E K S S O L AC E I N LONDON’S TREES
“Most agree that when it does restart, there will be less of it. Companies will want to save money; flying damages the environment. I don’t contest either. But if we stop visiting each other, we will, in important ways, be diminished. Travel not only broadens the mind, it deepens understanding – business travel most of all. Interactions on a work trip, unlike those on holiday, are not just with those serving you. You deal with people as equals. You go into their workplaces, you talk about what they are making and doing, you enter their lives.” For well over a year during the pandemic Michael worked from his home office in North London. The FT is a 24hour operation in London, Hong Kong and New York 64 W I T S R E V I E W
and there were days when the newspaper and website were produced without one person in any of these offices. The first people who wanted to return to the office were the younger staff – “living in shared accommodation, with four flatmates working at the kitchen table.” Michael loves London, his home of 40 years: “One of the things I like most about this city is it has managed to combine a huge sprawling metropolis with vast amounts of free green space to explore. I love Highgate Wood and Hampstead Heath where I swim in the open ponds with seagulls, herons and ducks. “I also love London for how international it is. It has always been a
“You will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade.” JANE AUSTEN, SENSE AND SENSIBILIT Y
city of immigration; it’s what makes it a great global trading nation and world city, and I find this endlessly stimulating, which is part of why I was very strongly opposed to Brexit.” And while the world tries to sort itself out, Michael seeks solace in London’s trees. In a column he wrote recently he says: “However bad things are, the trees have towered over worse. Their gnarled trunks, their knobbly longevity, are proof that whatever is troubling us will one day be a memory, that this
too will pass. In the meantime, whether shading us with summer greenery, carpeting our way with cast-off autumn leaves or standing bare and bleak as we drudge through winter mud, they just don’t care. As Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility says to the trees around Norland, the family home, just before she is forced to depart from it: ‘You will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade.’”
