I told you back in August that I was going to take a break and fully expected to be back in September. Here we are, three weeks into the month and you've heard nothing from me.
I’ve decided to put the podcast into suspense; initially to suspend it for a full 12 months until September 2024. I'm now aiming to restart in January.
It’s tempting to comment on today’s news which indicates that the UK Government is likely to roll back on its Net Zero 2050 commitments, but I will resist the temptation and leave you to follow it up for yourself. I'm sure there will be plenty of stories when I come back in January.
Email problems
Why suspend at all? Well, I've been having a lot of pressures, not least from problems with my email account. Messages were bouncing back or were just not being delivered and I have spent hours trying to get to the bottom of the problem and to field the misunderstandings and missed calls that the problem caused. Not only that, my Webmaster and three technicians at the mail hosting company have also scratched their heads over several weeks trying to find a solution. I had three extensive calls with Apple Support. The first one was very dismissive and the advisor told me that she was one of the most expert members of staff, and this was clearly a third-party issue. Really? It affected my brand new iMac, but not my iPhone, my iPad or my MacBook.
My final conversation with Apple lasted 90 minutes and eventually came to a workaround which solved the problem. I won't go into great detail, but a system which had worked perfectly well for years had now been corrupted by an Apple Operating System update. Finally, they admitted that they were looking into a problem like this and hoping to resolve it with future updates.
Theme
OK, well that explains time pressures, but it's more than that. I need to have a clear theme and one of my listeners has said that the interviews which I offer you often don't really fit into a clear theme. The reason for that is that the majority of my interview guests are proposed to me by PR agencies, rather than being people that I have invited personally. That means that the topics which are offered come in random order. I need to get a grip on that in the future. I also need to get a grip on giving you quality content because a number of people have said that they prefer the sustainability news and the various topics covered in each episode rather than the interviews. Such episodes require a lot more work, so should I cut back to twice a month? Probably not, because you’ll never be sure when to expect a new episode.
Sustainable Futures
As far as the theme for future episodes is concerned, I've got that under consideration. No definite ideas yet, but it'll probably be more towards the futures than sustainability, although sustainability will remain very much part of it. Maybe we'll do some scenario planning. Maybe we'll look at some alternative futures and look at the steps which need to be carried out between now and then in order to realise those scenarios. We can look as well at what experts think is the likelihood of those scenarios being achieved.
Index
One thing I will do during this break between episodes is to create an index to the topics covered in the 475 episodes of the Sustainable Futures Report which have been published to date. At least I'll aim to have the last three years indexed by the time we meet again in January. That will enable you to go to the website and select episodes by topic or to pick an interview guest that you'd like to hear again.
That’s It
Well, that's more or less it for this very short episode of the Sustainable Futures Report. I want to thank you all for listening and for your feedback and your ideas. Special thanks to my patrons. As patrons, you may wish to suspend your support for the moment because as I've indicated you're not going to get any more episodes before next year. If you continue to subscribe, then I think it's only fair if I pass on your donations to charity, so I will think about doing that for the rest of the year.
And that is it!
I’m Anthony Day.
That was a message from the Sustainable Futures Report.
I’ll be back!
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