[Week 9] I’m an advocate of advocaat

A week of two halves this one, whereby I tried to squeeze all reading and meetings into two days in order to allow me to travel to Groningen in the Netherlands to speak at this year’s ESNS conference.

My old mug on an ESNS speaker graphic

As a result Monday and Tuesday were spent hunched over the laptop pulling various affairs into order including a check in with the Jazz Festival team, a recap meeting with Ronnie Scott’s, a catch up with the Canadian Live Music Association over progress with their Sustainable Live initiative, as well as a quick catch up with Helen Harland at Manchester City Council to see if the city might be up for sharing things like battery hub energy resourcing and public travel infrastructure with Liverpool. Actually, that was just Monday. On Tuesday my day started with a conversation about how Cheltenham Festivals will collaborate with the local council to deliver GECoP Phase II for the town, followed by a chat with the Anguillan government, where there are some exciting conversations around facilitating IP, protections and knowledge exchange between UK domestic sectors and the British Overseas Territories. There are some interesting alignments between where Anguilla is on their sustainable events journey and the current situation in which Liverpool finds itself – and it feels like there may be something here that could inform or enhance my research, but I’m not entirely sure how. Yet.

I then delivered a webinar for twenty local authorities across the UK in how to use and environmental audit and assessment toolkit I have created as part of my contribution to the live event sector’s wider environmental efforts.

Ronald Ligtenberg (Possibilize), Mika Christoffersen (Roskilde), Me, and Jessica de Haan (Possibilize) onstage at Kuntspuntz, Oosterpoort, Groningen

After this I packed my overnight bag and got ready to travel to ESNS. The two travel days weren’t exactly exciting (and I despise driving in that part of Europe in particular) but the conference day was great to connect early in the year with many of my international contacts, but also an opportunity to catch up with some of the sustainability heavyweights around our world – Rob van Wegen, Claire O Neill and Linnéa Svensson offering some particularly sparkly potential to discussions and plans for 2026… I came home on the Friday night and slept for a day before another 12 hours in the inbox.

Emails. Emails never changes.