A song released in 1974 is finding a whole new audience in 2026 after being covered by Paul Weller. Along the way it also caught the attention of Morrissey and Noel Gallagher, not bad for a song that began life as a deeply personal diary entry.

But that’s not really why we invited Brian Protheroe onto The Third Half. He’s our Musician of the Month for July because, more than fifty years after Pinball, he’s still doing what great artists do: staying curious, still questioning, still writing, still recording, still creating.

His latest album, Still Walking, is his fourth release in as many years, and it’s anything but a nostalgic look backwards. It explores ageing, belonging, politics, memory, music and the simple determination to keep moving forward, which feels like a very Third Half record to make in your eighties.

Our conversation wandered from Shakespeare to Sergeant Pepper, from songwriting to acting, from Donald Trump to Paul Weller, with plenty of humour along the way. Brian reflected on why his wife asks him not to write another death song, why creativity becomes even more important as we get older, and the difference between acting and songwriting with one memorably simple observation: “Music is to do with my inside, and acting is to do with someone else’s inside, which I try and put inside me.”

As always with On the Turntable, we’ve selected four tracks that tell the story behind the conversation.

- ‘Pinball’ is the song that refuses to fade away, still connecting generations of listeners more than half a century after it was written.

- ⁠’Still Walking’ captures the spirit of the album and, in many ways, Brian himself.

- ⁠’Mad Dog’ reminds us that he’s still writing about the world as it is, not simply the world as it was.

- ⁠And ‘Belong’ became an even more powerful song after hearing Brian explain what belonging really means to him.

Whether you’ve followed Brian Protheroe since the 1970s as an actor or singer, or only recently discovered him through Paul Weller’s cover of Pinball, I think you’ll enjoy this conversation.

At the very end of our interview I asked Brian what he hoped people would take away from Still Walking.

His answer:

“The urge to play it again.”

Watch on YouTube | Listen on your favourite audio streaming platform:

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/c43ed0ca-a2bc-4468-a2ec-fe14188fb491/

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There’s an article doing the rounds in the accounting trade press this week, off the back of HLB International’s ESG Forum at the ICAEW in July. The thrust of it is that ESG has stopped being a regulatory tickbox and become a strategic lever, and that as the conversation moves from “how do we comply” to “how does an ESG strategy contribute to long-term growth,” the services accountants and advisers provide have to evolve with it.

Fair enough. But read between the lines and the real story isn’t really about accountants discovering ESG. It’s about accountants discovering their clients got there first.

Look at the procurement number buried in the piece. Two thirds of procurement professionals now say ESG is an important part of their company strategy, and more than half already have a sustainable and ethical procurement policy in place. Read that again. This isn’t a niche pocket of sustainability specialists. This is procurement, the most pragmatic, margin-obsessed function in any business, telling you governance and sustainability criteria are now baked into who they buy from. That’s not virtue signalling. That’s two thirds of an entire profession changing the rules of who gets a contract.

Which means everybody should be getting this by now. Not “should be thinking about it eventually.” Should be getting it, today, because the people who write the purchase orders already have.

And you can see it playing out commercially, not just in policy documents. Take a company like Origina, which builds its whole business on third-party support for enterprise software rather than forcing clients onto an endless upgrade treadmill. Sweat the asset you’ve already paid for instead of replacing it before its time. Less hardware churn, less waste, better governance over what you’re actually running and why, and capital that isn’t being burned on forced upgrades gets freed up to invest in people instead of vendors. I constantly raise this with partners and clients as an absolutely key value lever, not a side benefit. That’s why I love supporting Tomás and the leadership team at Origina, because they’re helping clients meet real ESG goals through the asset decisions they were already making, not bolting sustainability on as an afterthought.

So the gap isn’t conviction. The same piece quotes a UN study finding eighty per cent of SMEs recognise sustainability as a real issue, and only eight per cent are actually reporting on it. That’s not a belief problem. Everybody already believes it.

It’s a translation problem. The procurement department gets it. The commercially switched-on operators like Origina get it and are building entire propositions around it. The client, increasingly, gets it. The bit that’s catching up is the advisory layer in between, still offering compliance frameworks to clients who’ve already moved on to asking what their ESG position does for growth, capital access, and talent.

There’s a familiar shape to that, if you’ve listened to me at all on The Third Half. The professionals at the cutting edge of an industry rarely get caught out by not knowing. They get caught out by knowing and still selling the old service because that’s the one they’ve always sold. Same instinct that keeps a person doing the job that made them successful for a decade after it stopped fitting who they are.

The forum in July is accountants trying to close that gap before the market closes it for them. Worth watching whether they manage it before procurement and the Originas of this world finish writing the new rules without them.

#Tomas #Origina

People. Planet. Progress.

Source: The ESG Pivot: From Regulatory Pressure to Strategic Advantage, International Accounting Bulletin, 26 June 2026.

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A few years back, in a bric-a-brac shop in Normandy, I found a pile of old Charlie Hebdo comics. Not framed behind glass with a brass plaque. A pile. Stuffed in amongst old books, chipped crockery, yellowing postcards, all the stuff that piles up when nobody can be bothered throwing it out.

I wasn’t even looking for them.

Like most people outside France, I knew Charlie Hebdo because of the murders in Paris in 2015. The shock, the marches, the slogan.

Je Suis Charlie.

Back then the debate was all about whether you agreed with what they published. Some did, some didn’t. Wrong question, though. The real question was whether people get to question, challenge, mock and satirise without somebody turning up to shoot them for it.

Standing in that shop years later, I actually looked at the work instead of the headlines. Some of it was ballsy and crude. Some of it was genuinely clever. Some of it went straight over my head, on account of my French stretching to ordering a beer and finding the toilet.

Nothing was off limits. Politicians, journalists, social trends, the powerful, the powerless, ordinary punters. Nobody got a pass. Probably not even the cartoonists themselves.

I bought four, stuck them in cheap frames, the kind that don’t pretend to be anything else (sorry Pip!) and hung them in what’s technically the spare bedroom and occasionally my office. They make me smile every time I walk in.

Why I bought them has changed over the years. At first, just because they were colourful and quirky, reminded me of a good trip, looked good on the wall. Now I think they stand for something bigger. Not Charlie Hebdo. Not France. Not politics. Just one idea: nobody’s beyond question. Including us. That’s the bit everyone conveniently forgets.

The older I get, the more that matters. Everyone bangs on about diversity and somehow means conformity. Everyone loves debate until you actually disagree with them. Everyone tells you to find your voice, then has a face like a slapped arse the minute you actually use it.

Every tribe’s got its sacred cows. Every movement grows its own orthodoxies. Every organisation ends up with the one thing nobody’s allowed to question, usually invented by the same people who used to complain about being silenced themselves. That’s generally where it starts going to shit.

The Third Half was never meant to be a campaign or a movement, just curiosity, and honestly it still runs on curiosity and people being decent enough to talk to me for an hour. Musicians, founders, teachers, bankers, environmentalists, sportspeople, artists. People with stories, people with ideas, people who change their minds halfway through a sentence and don’t apologise for it.

Nobody turns up with all the answers, least of all me. The moment you think your side’s got a monopoly on wisdom, you stop listening. Stop listening, you stop learning. Stop learning, and progress turns into dogma, which is a rubbish thing to put on a t-shirt.

That’s the link between four old comics in cheap frames and a not-for-profit outfit in Berkshire. Not the cartoons, not the politics. The spirit. Asking the awkward questions. Laughing at ourselves. Sitting with ideas that make us squirm a bit. Checking our own assumptions before we go after everyone else’s.

Maybe that’s the real lesson on my wall. Not Je Suis Charlie. Something smaller. Less grand. Closer to what we’re actually doing here.

Je Suis TTH.

We haven’t got the answers. We’re still up for asking the questions, and having a laugh while we’re at it.

My mother-in-law has just bought me a subscription to Private Eye. I’m not entirely sure if it’s a gift or a message. Either way, the wall’s about to get busier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_suis_Charlie

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Yesterday should have been a complete write-off.

The hottest day of the year. Amber weather warnings threatening to turn red. Rail services collapsing in slow motion. My wife sensibly decided that spending an evening travelling around London in temperatures around 35 degrees wasn’t her idea of fun (and she was off working early in the morning too and didn’t want to get stranded – god bless our rail network).

To be honest, it wasn’t sounding much like my idea of fun either.

I spent most of the morning looking at train apps and weather forecasts, trying to convince myself that staying at home was the sensible option. Every time I checked, another train seemed to be cancelled, delayed or diverted. The logistics were becoming ridiculous. Three separate train journeys to get to a small gig in London.

Scotland were playing Brazil at 11pm. A neighbour had already invited me round to watch the match. There was a cold drink, a comfortable chair and a perfectly reasonable excuse not to go.

When I mentioned my doubts to my old mate JJ, he was having none of it.

“Get your lardy arse up to London. I managed to survive ‘76.”

As the day went on, the temperature climbed beyond that.

By mid-afternoon I had a headache, I was sweaty, uncomfortable and still unconvinced. Then I had one of those moments that probably happens less seldom that it should for all of us. I stopped looking for reasons not to go - and simply decided to go.

So I sensibly donned a hat and walked to the station in the roaring heat. Local train to Reading. ‘Fast’ (not fast) train to London - one of a very small number going anywhere at any speed. London underground (oh my, my lardy ass was getting fried right there). More walking. More heat.

And it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in weeks.

First there was some time with child 2, Flora. Since she’s moved to London we don’t see nearly as much of each other as we’d like, so grabbing a beer together and having a proper laugh felt like a gift.

Then JJ arrived and the three of us spent the next hour putting the world to rights, talking about life, work, public services and everything in between. And laughing. A lot.

After that, JJ and I headed to The Water Rats.

If you’ve never been, it’s exactly the sort of venue that reminds you why live music matters. Small. Intimate. No distractions. No giant screens. No corporate hospitality. Just artists, songs and an audience.

Bella Collins, the support act, was excellent. (So good that I’ve already invited her onto The Third Half!)

Then Anna Howie walked on stage.

Now, I should declare an interest. Anna was the very first Musician of the Month on The Third Half, so I’ve been a fan for a while – she is a brilliant human. But if anything, last night exceeded expectations.

There couldn’t have been more than fifty people in the small intimate room, yet from the moment she started singing she held every single person there. Not through volume or theatrics, but through sheer presence. Some performers command attention because they’re loud. Anna commands attention because she’s authentic.

Her music sits somewhere between country and Americana, but that’s only part of the story. What really sets her apart is her songwriting. She notices things. Small details. Everyday moments. Relationships. Conversations. The things most of us walk past without a second thought. Then she somehow turns them into songs that feel deeply personal and completely universal at the same time.

The humour is there, of course. Anna has a wonderfully mischievous streak and a knack for making an audience laugh. But what had me pinned down last night was the emotional depth beneath it all. Behind the cheeky smile and the playful observations are songs about love, loss, hope, disappointment and the complicated business of being human.

The best writers tell the truth, even when they’re disguising it as entertainment. Anna does that exceptionally well.

For an hour and a quarter she had me and JJ completely engrossed. No checking phones. No trips to the bar. No wandering attention. Just listening.

In an age where we’re all supposedly consuming more content than ever, that’s a surprisingly rare thing.

Anna connected effortlessly with the room. The songs were wonderful, the musicianship superb, but it was the storytelling, the emotion. Every song felt like an invitation into a moment, a memory or an observation that mattered to her and, by the end of it, somehow mattered to all of us as well.

It was one of the finest gigs I’ve seen in the last year.

Then came the journey home. More trains. More heat. More delays.

I arrived back just in time to catch the second half of Scotland’s match.

Scotland lost 3-0.

Not every part of the evening was perfect.

But here’s the thing. If I’d stayed at home, I’d have missed all of it. The beer with Flora. The laughs with JJ. The discovery of a brilliant support act. One of the best live performances I’ve seen in a long time.

Sometimes perseverance sounds far too grand a word. Nobody crossed an ocean. Nobody climbed a mountain. I just got on a train.

But life has a habit of rewarding the people who occasionally make the effort when it would be easier not to.

If you get the chance to see Anna Howie live, take it. https://www.annahowiemusic.com/

And if you’re sitting at home wondering whether you can really be bothered to go somewhere, see someone or do something you’ve been looking forward to, remember the wise words (sic) of my old mucker JJ…

‘Get your lardy arse out the door’.

You never quite know what you’re going to find when you get there.

People. Planet. Progress.

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We have been having some brilliant conversations on The Third Half recently.

This one with Tanishq Jain, founder of Dash, is one of the most honest conversations I have had with an early stage founder. No bravado. No pitch mode. Just someone building something real and telling you exactly what that feels like from the inside.

Tanishq is young, sharp and genuinely passionate about sustainability in a way that goes back generations in his family. This conversation has stayed with me.

1. The best business ideas come from spotting what everyone else is ignoring

Tanishq did not set out to start a business.

He was at the London Stock Exchange trying to help rate sustainability funds when he noticed something that stopped him cold. They were trying to rate funds on their sustainability credentials without actually knowing the sustainability characteristics of the companies inside them.

Top down. Full of assumptions. Layers of unverified information.

He called it an error 404 in his mind.

That moment of frustration became the foundation of Dash. Not a grand plan. Not a lightbulb moment over a flat white. Just someone spotting something obviously broken and deciding he could not leave it alone.

The best ideas usually start exactly like that.

2. Every founder hits a wall. The ones who make it learn to sit with it.

Q1 2025 was hard.

Tanishq is honest about it in a way that most founders are not. When the US administration changed and the macro environment shifted, he found himself asking questions he had not expected to be asking. Am I in the right industry. Is this industry ready. Is my business ready to be part of it.

He describes it as an existential moment. Not a crisis. A moment.

The shift he made was subtle but important. Instead of making decisions out of those moments, he learned to use them as brainstorming sessions. A conversation with himself rather than a verdict on the business.

That is not a small thing. That is the difference between founders who keep going and founders who do not.

3. Market timing is everything. Until you actually live it.

People told him this for years. He nodded along. He did not really get it.

Then he got it.

Market timing is not just about capturing customers at the right moment. It is about whether your investors still have runway to give you. Whether the market is open enough for people to try something new. Whether the world is in a mood to change or a mood to survive.

He came from a family business where you put in capital and got sales from day one. Tech is completely different. And the gap between what he expected and what he found taught him more about building a business than any accelerator programme ever did.

If this gave you something to think about, the full conversation is worth your time.

We go deeper into recycling ships, the circular economy, AI and sustainability, and what Dash is really trying to build.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/tth-blueprint-episode-22-tanishq

People. Planet. Progress.

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I seem to hear the same phrase several times a week these days.

Sometimes it’s at an event. Sometimes it’s over lunch. Sometimes it’s from a former colleague I haven’t seen for a while. Occasionally it’s from somebody who has somehow managed to steer a conversation about music, sport, holidays or the weather back round to their pension arrangements.

The phrase itself varies slightly, but the meaning is always the same.

“Of course I could retire tomorrow.”

I’ve reached the point where I barely react to it. Not because it’s unusual, but because it’s become so predictable. Partly that’s an age thing, of course. When you’re in your twenties, people talk about promotions, mortgages and where they’re going on holiday. Once you reach your fifties and sixties, conversations start drifting towards pension pots, downsizing, buy-to-lets, grandchildren and whether Portugal is really as good as everyone says it is.

What I find interesting, though, is that the people who tell me they could retire almost never seem to be making any serious effort to do so. In fact, the opposite is often true. The man explaining that he no longer needs to work is also advising three startups, chairing a board, mentoring two founders and somehow fitting in enough lunches to keep half the hospitality industry afloat. The woman telling me she could walk away tomorrow is in the middle of writing a book, raising money for a charity and planning a new business venture. Neither looks remotely ready for a life of daytime television and discounted coach trips.

Which makes me wonder whether retirement is actually the point.

There’s a particular version of this I notice mostly, though not exclusively, among men in their early fifties. It isn’t really about freedom at all. It’s a flex dressed up as a throwaway remark, a way of saying look how well I’ve done without having to say it outright. The pension pot becomes the new company car. I can usually tell the difference within about thirty seconds of a conversation starting, and it’s a different thing entirely from what follows.

Because for most people, I don’t think it’s boasting about money, at least not consciously. What they’re really talking about is freedom. They’ve reached a stage where they no longer have to do certain things. They can choose their projects. They can choose who they work with. They can say no to the client, the boss, the commute or the endless internal meeting that should have been an email.

That’s a wonderful position to be in. But it isn’t retirement. It’s autonomy. And the two are very different things.

Over the past year, through The Third Half, I’ve talked to musicians, academics, founders, campaigners, former executives, sportspeople and charity leaders. Many of them are well beyond the stage of life where anyone would blame them for putting their feet up, yet very few seem interested in doing so. What drives them isn’t money, and in most cases it probably hasn’t been money for years. It’s curiosity, contribution, the chance to build something or support something or leave something behind. Some are writing albums. Some are launching businesses. Some are mentoring younger people or campaigning for causes they care about. A few are doing all of it at once. The common thread is that they remain engaged with the world around them.

I suspect that’s what a lot of people actually mean when they tell me they could retire tomorrow. What they’re really saying is that they’ve earned the right to choose.

Fair enough.

But there’s another group. You know the ones. The people who have been telling you they could retire for the last five years. Every conversation somehow circles back to it. Every lunch includes an update. Every social gathering brings a fresh analysis of whether next year might finally be the year. At some point it starts to sound less like a plan and more like a hobby, and that’s the bit I struggle with.

Retirement isn’t a hostage negotiation. It isn’t a software implementation project. It doesn’t need quarterly updates and a steering committee. If you want to retire, retire. Travel, volunteer, read, walk, golf, paint, grow tomatoes, learn Italian, spend more time with your family, whatever it is that makes you happy, go and do it.

But if you’ve been telling me every six months for the past decade that you could retire tomorrow, I reserve the right to conclude that you don’t actually want to. And that’s fine too. Just be honest about it. There’s nothing wrong with continuing to work, create, contribute and stay involved if that’s what gives you energy. Some of the happiest people I know have built exactly that life.

So here’s my entirely unsolicited advice.

If you want to retire, FFS just do it!!

The rest of us don’t need the quarterly update.

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One of the longest-running features on The Third Half, and one that needs your help.

Bad Ideas Club is where we celebrate the world’s most gloriously misguided ideas. Sometimes they’re technology failures. Sometimes they’re business decisions. Sometimes they’re everyday things that make you wonder who thought they were a good idea in the first place.

The nominations come from the TTH community.

You send them in. We investigate. We laugh, wince, debate and occasionally discover that the “bad” idea wasn’t quite as bad as we first thought.

Got a nomination?

Send it our way. Technology, sport, food, travel, work, culture or everyday life. If it makes you shake your head and mutter “what were they thinking?”, it probably belongs in Bad Ideas Club.

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https://www.positive.news/economics/imagination-and-creation-are-products-of-time-and-space/

We have talked about this before on The Third Half. Phillippa Mole studied art at university alongside sport, then spent three decades as a sports psychologist, a GB bobsleigh athlete, a BBC broadcaster, a coach. The art never went away, she says, it was just bubbling under, unshown. She paints abstract now, chasing the feeling of movement rather than the thing itself, the kind of motion she spent half her life living through sport before she ever put it on canvas. April De Angelis trained as an actress, gave up on writing as a hopeless idea, then years later won a playwriting competition off the back of a leaflet and never looked back. Neither of them set out to become what they became. They just kept paying attention until something else became possible.

Imagination and creation are products of time and space.

Simple enough. Obvious, even.

Yet somewhere along the way we seem to have decided that every minute should be occupied, every silence filled and every empty corner of life optimised.

We carry entire libraries in our pockets but rarely sit long enough to read. We have access to more music, art, poetry and culture than any generation before us, yet somehow find ourselves scrolling past much of it in search of the next distraction.

The irony is that many of the things that make life richer require the very thing we seem least willing to give them: time.

A song is more than three minutes of entertainment. A painting is more than a splash of colour. A poem is more than words on a page. Art invites us to stop, observe, reflect and occasionally see the world differently.

That feels increasingly important. Neil Griffiths of the charity Arts Emergency made the same point recently, almost word for word, writing in Positive News about Ireland’s basic income for artists. The scheme has just been made permanent after the figures showed it paid for itself. One artist who benefited had been working part-time as a receptionist to cover her rent. Once that pressure lifted, she made her first film. The money didn’t buy her talent. It bought her time.

I have good Irish friends and find myself in Dublin a fair bit these days, so this one is for them, and for whoever out there is the next Joyce, Wilde or Heaney and doesn’t know it yet. Ireland has gone further than most in actually paying for that idea rather than just admiring it from a distance.

The world does not need another algorithm telling us what we already know.

It needs people willing to imagine something different.

The Irish have always seemed to understand this. For a relatively small island, Ireland has gifted the world an extraordinary number of storytellers, playwrights, musicians and poets, people who could take the ordinary and reveal something extraordinary within it. Not because they had better technology or bigger budgets, but because they paid attention. They noticed the details, the conversations, the landscapes, the humour and heartbreak of everyday life.

Great art rarely emerges from haste. It emerges from observation.

A musician sits with an idea until it becomes a melody. A writer wrestles with a sentence until it says exactly what it means. A poet finds a way to express something that everyone has felt but nobody has quite managed to describe.

Those things take time.

More importantly, they require space. Space to think, to wander, to be bored, to sit in a cafe, stare out of a train window, walk along a beach, listen to an old record or simply let the mind drift without purpose.

Many of the best ideas arrive when we stop trying so hard to find them. April still has half-written titles sitting on her computer, ideas she loved for four days and then quietly let go of on the fifth. They are not failures. They are the cost of doing the work at all.

Perhaps that is why art matters so much. Not because everyone should become an artist, but because art reminds us there is value beyond productivity, that not everything worthwhile can be measured, that beauty has a place in our lives. Creativity is not a luxury. It is part of what makes us human.

The next great poem, song, painting or story is probably already out there somewhere, waiting for someone to give it the time and space it deserves.

Maybe the challenge for all of us isn’t learning how to do more, but learning how to leave a little more room for imagination.

After all, imagination and creation are products of time and space.

The question is whether we are still prepared to make room for either.

People. Planet. Progress.

https://www.positive.news/economics/imagination-and-creation-are-products-of-time-and-space/

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I don’t usually write about my day job on here. But something happened last week that I can’t stop thinking about, and I think it matters beyond Abuja, beyond Nigeria, maybe even beyond Africa.

On June 17 and 18, 2026, the Nigeria Environmental Summit (NESt) took place at the Abuja Continental Hotel. The theme was Unlocking Nigeria’s Green Economy. About a year of my life went into making it happen.

I want to tell you what that year looked like, what the summit was really about, and why I think it connects to conversations a lot of you are already having.

The year before the room fills up

Most people see a summit and think: speeches, panels, badges. They don’t see the spreadsheets.

Over the past year I’ve been serving as Secretary and Digital Communications Officer at the Nigerian Environmental Summit Group (NESUG), the public-private consortium that runs NESt annually. That title sounds clean. The reality was thousands of registrant records to deduplicate, DNS configurations for our mailing domain, QR-coded access passes, meal tickets, name tags, coordinating with UN agencies, chasing partnership letters to organisations like Lafarge Africa and GIZ, and nomination campaigns for the Nigeria Environmental Hall of Fame.

There were also things I genuinely hadn’t done before. I built AI-powered web apps (a Green Economy Oracle and a Green Future Pledge Generator) deployed on Vercel, running on the Anthropic API, for a live five-minute demonstration slot at the summit itself. A year ago I wouldn’t have known how to do that. Now I do.

That’s the part that sits with me. Not just what we built for the event, but what the event built in me.

What “green economy” actually means in Nigeria

I want to be honest about something. “Green economy” can sound like a phrase invented in a boardroom somewhere in Geneva to make wealthy countries feel better about their emissions. In Nigeria, it means something different and something more urgent.

Nigeria is the most populous country on the continent, a major oil producer, and simultaneously one of the countries most exposed to the effects of climate change: flooding in the south, desertification creeping down from the north, energy poverty affecting hundreds of millions of people. The tension at the heart of NESt is real: how do you build an economy that lifts people out of poverty without repeating the extractive mistakes of the last century?

The conversations at NESt 2026 weren’t abstract. We had policymakers, private sector players, NGOs, development finance institutions all in the same room. The question being asked, not just on panels but in corridors and over lunch, was: where is the actual investment going, and who does it reach?

That question doesn’t have a clean answer yet. But the fact that it’s being asked seriously, publicly, with receipts, by Nigerians in Nigeria, is itself significant.

What actually happened in that room

NESt 2026 ran across two full days. The programme covered green financing, renewable energy policy, sustainable agriculture, and waste management, with sessions designed to move beyond diagnosis and into action.

NESUG itself is worth understanding. It’s not a government agency and it’s not a typical NGO. It sits deliberately in the space between public institutions and private sector interests, trying to hold both accountable to the same long-term agenda. That structure gives it unusual credibility and unusual pressure. When a development finance institution and a federal ministry official are both in the room, you can’t afford to be vague.

What struck me most wasn’t any single speech. It was the density of the network in that hotel. People who had only emailed each other for months shaking hands. Implementing partners comparing notes. Young environmental professionals watching how the senior figures navigated disagreement. That’s what a summit actually produces not a communiqué, but a living document made of relationships.

A year on, and what comes next

I reflected publicly after NESt 2026 wrapped up, there’s something bigger underneath it.

Nigeria’s green economy transition is real, it’s underway, and it’s being shaped right now by the people willing to show up and do the unglamorous work the spreadsheets, the DNS records, the partnership letters that never get replied to, and the ones that do. NESUG is one of the institutions trying to make that work count for something. NESt is where it surfaces once a year.

I’m proud I was part of it. And I’ll be back next year with considerably less imposter syndrome.

Ishaku Happy is an editor in cheif for The Third Half

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I have known Tanishq for over two years now, and every conversation I learn something new about him. This one was no exception.

Tanishq is the founder of Dash, your AI Chief Sustainability Officer. The idea is simple. Make sustainability business friendly and ROI driven rather than a tick box exercise nobody really understands.

But the real story goes back further than any pitch deck. Tanishq grew up in a small town in India in a family that recycles ships for a living. His dad buys decommissioned vessels and brings the metal back into circulation. His grandmother ran her own creative business from home long before anyone called it entrepreneurship. Sustainability and entrepreneurship were never concepts to him growing up. They were just life.

In this conversation we talk about leaving a comfortable career at the London Stock Exchange after spotting a fundamental flaw in how sustainability funds were being rated from the top down rather than the ground up. We talk about the brutal shift in investor expectations since 2023, the existential wobble every founder hits at some point, and why he has learned to treat those moments as brainstorming sessions rather than verdicts.

We get honest about AI. About building a sustainability business that also depends on AI infrastructure with a real environmental footprint, and why he sets hard spend limits rather than letting AI quietly creep into every part of the product.

And we talk about leadership in a team of three. What young founders misunderstand about hierarchy, the courage it takes to say I do not know everything, and the very real imbalance between what early team members put in and what they get back out.

Tanishq is honest, reflective, and refreshingly unguarded about the pressure of building something this early. I have huge respect for what he is doing.

Want the full story? Listen to Scott’s full Blueprint conversation with Tanishq Jain here.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/5a7749c2-3e49-4b44-a247-9b4f98a6a780/

If you enjoyed this conversation you might also love our episode with Rebecca Ghim, founder of The Ferm, on turning food waste into something worth eating and building a values led business without losing yourself in the process. Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/tth-blueprint-episode-21-rebecca

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#sustainability #esg #fintech #climatetech #startup #founder #entrepreneurship #ai #circulareconomy #leadership #venturecapital #growthmindset #businesstok #worktok #responsiblegrowth #greentok #climateaction #techfounder #scaleup #podcast #thethirdhalf #podcastclip #purposedriven #sustainabletech #recycling #innovation #preseedstartup #futureofwork

I’ve got a confession. I’ve never really been a festival person.

I’ve been to plenty of gigs over the years, more pubs and village halls than muddy fields, and I’ve spent far too much money on T-shirts that seemed like a good idea at the time. But the idea of a weekend at Reading, Leeds or even Glastonbury has never particularly appealed.

For many people, they’re bucket-list events, cultural institutions, a rite of passage. To me, they’ve often felt like badges more than experiences. They’re just not for me.

This year, however, Katie and I are heading to WOMAD. Less a race to the biggest headline act, more an opportunity to discover something unexpected.

Which is why a story I read this week about a festival on the Isle of Wight caught my attention. The organisers have put nature itself at the centre of the programme rather than celebrity performers. The island is the attraction, not as a backdrop or a venue, but as the star.

It sounds simple, but it’s a surprisingly radical idea.

For years we’ve talked about sustainability as though it sits alongside our lives rather than underneath them. We build businesses around growth, technology around convenience, events around entertainment, and then we ask how we can make them a little greener. The Isle of Wight festival flips that around. What if nature isn’t the thing we work around? What if it’s the thing we build around?

That question reaches well beyond a festival programme. Environmental impact tends to get treated as a constraint, a cost, something that gets in the way of progress. But the organisations that will thrive in the coming decades may well be those that start with the planet and design from there, not because regulation demands it, but because it creates better products, stronger communities and more resilient organisations. Every digital decision eventually becomes a real-world one. Progress and responsibility aren’t opposing forces. They’ve always been drawing from the same account.

What I particularly like about this initiative is that it avoids the trap of guilt. Nobody is being lectured or shamed. People are simply being invited to reconnect with the place they live. The most effective environmental thinking rarely starts by telling us what we’re doing wrong. It starts by reminding us what we value: a beach, a woodland walk, a favourite stretch of coastline. The things worth protecting are usually the things we already love.

In a world obsessed with finding the next headline act, there’s something quietly refreshing about an event that suggests the biggest attraction was here all along.

Nature doesn’t need a support act. It just needs us to pay attention.

People. Planet. Progress.

https://www.positive.news/environment/the-island-festival-putting-nature-before-acts/

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He Quit Chasing Fame. 700,000 Fans Found Him Anyway | Bruce Soord

25 years. No big break. No record exec swooping in. Just the work, the craft, and the stubborn refusal to quit. Scott sits down with Bruce Soord of The Pineapple Thief to talk creativity, grief, camper vans, and why stopping chasing success is exactly when it showed up. 🎸✨ https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/he-quit-chasing-fame-700000-fans

Trainspotting: Maybe Rent Boy Was Right?

Bigger houses. Better cars. More stuff. More debt. More everything. The monologue we all laughed at in 1996 is starting to feel less like satire and more like a warning. Scott asks the uncomfortable question: have “more” and “better” finally stopped meaning the same thing? 🚂💭 https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/trainspotting-maybe-rent-boy-was

Autochthonous: A Greek Philosopher from Kirkcaldy

This week’s word of the day sounds like a forgotten 1974 prog rock album and means native to a place, belonging where it is. A Japan trip, a meditation on globalisation, and a case for the things that can’t be copy-pasted into an airport terminal. Archie Autochthonous of Kirkcaldy would approve. 📖🏴 https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/autochthonous-a-greek-philosopher

What If Your Grandmother Was Right All Along?

Sustainability didn’t start with a boardroom framework. It started with not wasting things. Rebecca Ghim of The Ferm learned that from her family long before it became a TED Talk topic. Old idea, radical application. 👵🥬 https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/what-if-your-grandmother-was-right

TTH Blueprint Episode 21: Rebecca Ghim — The Founder Turning Food Waste Into Something Worth Eating

She came to London for a visa, started with kimchi, and ended up building one of the UK’s most interesting sustainable food businesses. The Ferm rescues hundreds of kilos of perfectly good vegetables, the ones modern food systems simply forget about, and turns them into something Ottolenghi actually puts on their menu. Oh, and she makes kimchi tiramisu. Italians are furious. We are intrigued. 🎧🫙 https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/tth-blueprint-episode-21-rebecca

one more thing Forward this to the colleague who calls hustle culture “growth mindset,” the friend who thinks sustainability means buying an expensive water bottle, and anyone who has ever used the phrase “disruptive innovation” without irony.

I went into this conversation thinking we were going to talk about kimchi.

We did. But we also ended up somewhere I did not expect.

Rebecca Ghim is the founder of The Ferm, an award winning fermented food business built around a beautifully simple idea. The vegetables that get thrown away before they ever reach a plate are not waste. They are ingredients. They just need someone who cares enough to do something with them.

Rebecca came to London seven years ago to do a master’s in design for social innovation. She did not come here to start a business. She came here to stay. The startup visa was the plan. The kimchi was the vehicle. And somewhere between a pitch to her university endorsement body and her first farmers market, something real started to happen.

In this conversation, Rebecca talks about growing up in Korea, leaving at fifteen, and building a life in a city where you have to figure out a lot of things on your own. She talks about her complicated relationship with food, the frustration that became a passion, and why her grandmother’s instinct to use every part of every vegetable is the beating heart of everything The Ferm does.

We talk about what it actually takes to build a supply chain around rescued vegetables. About onboarding suppliers who have never thought of their offcuts as sellable goods. About the moment you realise one supplier generates around 300 kilogrammes of perfectly good vegetable waste in a single night and what that does to your sense of urgency.

We get into identity and culture and why food is one of the most personal things there is. We talk about the AI backlash she faced from her own community, and why she handled it with more honesty and self awareness than most brands three times her size would manage. And we talk about the tension every values led founder faces at some point. How much of yourself do you keep in the jar as you scale?

Rebecca also makes kimchi tiramisu. Italians may never forgive her. I think it sounds incredible.

This is one of my favourite conversations of recent months. Rebecca is thoughtful, funny, completely unpretentious, and building something that genuinely matters. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Find Rebecca and The Ferm at theferm.net and on Instagram at @the.firm.london

Want the full story? Listen to Scott’s full Blueprint conversation with Rebecca Ghim here.

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/3fc0168c-4103-4bc7-a83e-9f6bd5d29577/

If you enjoyed this conversation you might also love our episode with Bruce Soord, the songwriter and creative force behind The Pineapple Thief. Bruce opens up about twenty five years of quietly building an audience, writing an album alone in hotel rooms, grief, memory, and why he stopped chasing success and that is exactly when things started to happen. Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/he-quit-chasing-fame-700000-fans

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#foodwaste #sustainability #zerowaste #kimchi #fermentation #theferm #circulareconomy #sustainablefood #womenfounder #smallbusiness #foodtok #consciouseating #upcycledfood #culturefood #identity #growthmindset #purposedriven #thethirdhalf #podcast #entrepreneurship #foodinnovation #greentok #climateaction #community #koreanfood #plantbased #sustainablebusiness #podcastclip #founder #impactbusiness

A lot of sustainability is sold to us as something new.

New frameworks.

New technologies.

New targets.

New reports.

Then you meet someone like Rebecca Ghim and realise that some of the most powerful sustainability ideas are actually very old.

Rebecca is the founder of The Ferm, a London food business built around fermentation and food waste. But what fascinated me during our conversation wasn’t really the kimchi.

It was the philosophy.

Long before sustainability became a boardroom discussion, Rebecca’s family simply didn’t waste things. Vegetable stems were food. Leaves were food. Parts of ingredients that many of us ignore were treated as valuable.

Not because it was fashionable.

Because it made sense.

That mindset now sits at the heart of The Ferm.

During our conversation, Rebecca described seeing hundreds of kilograms of perfectly usable vegetables being discarded. Not because they were spoiled. Not because they were unsafe. Simply because modern food systems often struggle to find a place for them.

The response wasn’t outrage.

It was action.

What began as a design project, and a slightly desperate need for a startup visa, has grown into one of the UK’s most interesting sustainable food businesses.

Along the way, The Ferm has worked with Ottolenghi, collecting vegetable offcuts from its kitchens and transforming them into products that eventually found their way back onto the menu.

That’s not a PowerPoint presentation about the circular economy.

That’s the circular economy.

Rebecca is refreshingly honest about the challenges too.

How much of a family recipe can survive commercial scale?

What compromises are acceptable?

How do you grow a business without diluting the values that made it worth building in the first place?

These are questions every founder wrestles with, whether they’re making kimchi, software or anything in between.

It’s a conversation about food.

But it’s also a conversation about identity, culture, entrepreneurship, community and the tension between growth and purpose.

And, because this is The Third Half, it somehow ends with a discussion about cheese.

I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

I think you will too.

Full Episode coming up on FRIDAY! dont miss it

People. Planet. Progress.

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It’s been a while since Word Daily delivered a genuine belter, but this week’s effort was worth the wait. The word was autochthonous, which sounds less like a piece of vocabulary and more like either a Greek philosopher from Kirkcaldy or a forgotten progressive rock album from 1974. (Bruce Soord, if you’re reading this, I apologise in advance, because somewhere in Britain there is almost certainly a man called Nigel explaining the deeper meaning of Autochthonous while playing a seventeen-minute bass solo to six people in a village hall).

The actual meaning is pretty cool actually. Autochthonous means native to a place, indigenous, originating where it belongs. In ancient Greece it referred to people who were literally thought to have sprung from the earth itself. Nowadays it mostly refers to plants, animals, cultures and communities, although I am at this moment trying to work out where I can feed it into my every day conversation, to irritate the hell out of members of my family.

NB: There comes a point in every middle-aged man’s life when he realises he has become exactly the sort of person he used to mock. For some it’s cycling holidays. For others it’s vinyl, real ale, or becoming interested in different types of compost. Mine appears to be getting over excited by obscure vocabulary and then looking for opportunities to deploy it.

Most people return from holiday with photographs. I come back with obscure words, opinions about railway stations and detailed observations about public transport systems that nobody requested and nobody particularly wants to hear.

A year on from wandering around Japan, while the famous sights were every bit as impressive as advertised, the bits I still find myself talking about are often the smaller and more local ones. The old bloke tending vegetables beside a railway line in Nikko. The tiny restaurant with six seats and no English menu. The shop that appeared to sell exactly one thing because, several generations ago, a family had collectively decided that making this one thing exceptionally well was a perfectly reasonable way to spend the rest of their existence.

The thing that appealed to me about those places wasn’t nostalgia. It certainly wasn’t resistance to change. Japan is hardly a country that fears modernity. It was simply the sense that these places belonged where they were. They couldn’t easily be copied and pasted into an airport terminal in Dubai or a retail park outside Milton Keynes. They were products of local history, local culture and local people.

In other words, they were autochthonous.

The more I travel, the more I find myself appreciating that quality. For all the benefits of globalisation, and there are many, we’ve become remarkably good at making places look and feel similar. You can fly halfway around the world and still find the same coffee chains, the same fashion brands, the same playlists and increasingly the same conversations. Entire districts of major cities now resemble airport lounges that have somehow escaped and colonised the surrounding streets.

That’s brilliant when you’re hungry, jetlagged and desperately searching for a flat white. It’s slightly less brilliant when you realise that everywhere is beginning to feel a little bit like everywhere else.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself increasingly fond of the things that refuse to conform. Yorkshire isn’t Berkshire. Glasgow isn’t Edinburgh. Airdrie isn’t - well - anywhere else, which anyone who has spent five minutes there will happily confirm. The accents are different, the humour is different and the stories people tell themselves about where they live are different too.

The same applies to the local band playing to fifty people on a Friday night, the family café that has somehow survived three recessions, two ownership changes and the arrival of every chain imaginable, or the football club that has disappointed successive generations of your family while somehow remaining central to your identity. Rationally none of this makes much sense. Emotionally? It makes perfect sense.

That’s because the differences are the point.

I’m not arguing against progress, technology or internationalism. Anyone who has listened to me talk about Japan’s railways for more than thirty seconds will know that. What I am arguing for is a little appreciation for the things that could only have happened there, in that place, among those people. The odd traditions, the local businesses, the community institutions and the quirks that make somewhere feel distinct rather than interchangeable.

Maybe that’s why the word appealed to me. Not because it makes me sound clever, although I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the attraction, but because it reminds us that not everything needs to be optimised, scaled, modernised or transformed into a global brand experience.

Some things are valuable precisely because they belong where they are.

Otherwise we risk ending up in a world where every high street sells the same things, every city centre feels vaguely familiar and every conversation sounds as though it has been assembled by the same algorithm.

And Archie Autochthonous of Kirkcaldy would never have stood for that.

https://worddaily.com/words/autochthonous/?lctg=2e294143-a1e0-470c-8ef7-69823b3a3257

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Thirty years ago, a heroin addict from Leith delivered one of the most famous monologues in British cinema.

Most of us thought it was a joke.

Looking around today, I’m not so sure. Bigger houses. Better cars. Nicer holidays.

Larger televisions. More technology. Bigger mortgages. More debt. More consumption. More stuff.

The target was always the same.

More.

My generation was raised on a fairly straightforward promise.

Work hard. Get promoted. Earn more. Buy better things. Move to a bigger house.

Take nicer holidays. Retire comfortably. Success was measurable.

You could see it on the driveway, in the kitchen extension or in the holiday photos.

And if I’m honest, I bought into it too.

Most of us did.

After all, that was the deal.

The harder you worked, the more rewards you accumulated.

That wasn’t greed. That was aspiration.

Today I was reading an article about a group of economists who argue that rising inequality and environmental pressures are heading towards a collision course.

The report itself wasn’t what caught my attention.

What caught my attention was how quickly the debate became tribal.

Tax the rich. Don’t tax the rich. Climate crisis. Climate nonsense. Capitalism. Socialism.

The usual modern shouting match.

Yet I found myself thinking about something else entirely.

What if we’re debating the wrong question?

Maybe the issue isn’t who gets the biggest slice of the pie.

Maybe it’s whether we’ve built a system that only works if the pie keeps getting bigger forever.

Because that’s what we’ve spent most of our lives doing.

Growing. Consuming. Expanding. Upgrading. Accumulating.

Always assuming the next version would be better than the current one.

I spent most of my career in technology.

If any industry embodies this mindset, it’s ours.

More software.

More platforms.

More subscriptions.

More cloud.

More devices.

More data.

More complexity.

Technology has undoubtedly improved lives. Better healthcare. Better communication. Better access to knowledge. Better opportunities for millions of people.

But even technology seems trapped by the same assumption as the rest of society.

That bigger is always better.

That growth is always progress.

That enough is a destination nobody should ever reach.

The older I get, the less convinced I am.

Not because I’ve suddenly become anti-business.

Quite the opposite.

Business creates jobs, opportunities and prosperity.

Not because ambition is wrong.

Ambition is often what drives positive change.

And certainly not because people shouldn’t enjoy the rewards of hard work.

They absolutely should.

But somewhere along the way we’ve started confusing accumulation with success.

A bigger house doesn’t automatically create a happier family.

A better car doesn’t automatically create a better life.

Another overseas holiday doesn’t automatically bring fulfilment.

And the latest technology doesn’t automatically solve the problems that matter most.

Sometimes it simply creates a newer version of the old ones.

The uncomfortable truth is that the world has never been wealthier.

Technology has never been more powerful.

Human ingenuity has never been greater.

Yet anxiety seems everywhere.

Trust feels lower.

Politics feels angrier.

Communities feel weaker.

And despite all our progress, we’re still arguing about what a good life actually looks like.

Perhaps that’s why this debate matters.

Not because of climate activists.

Not because of economists.

Not because of billionaires.

Because sooner or later every generation has to decide what success means.

For most of my life, success was measured by more.

More money. More house. More holidays. More technology. More consumption.

Maybe Rent Boy’s joke wasn’t really a joke after all.

Maybe it was a warning.

The awkward question facing all of us now is whether we’ve finally reached the point where “more” and “better” have stopped being the same thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/world-inequality-lab-equality-academics-planetary-survival

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Not bad advice for musicians.

Not bad advice for the rest of us either.

While editing my recent conversation with Bruce Soord, I found myself coming back to three moments that had very little to do with music and everything to do with life.

The first was about persistence.

Bruce has spent more than 25 years building an audience. No overnight breakthrough. No talent show. No viral moment. Just showing up, writing songs and continuing to do the work.

The second was about creativity.

The best songs, according to Bruce, aren’t manufactured. They appear. They emerge from experience, observation and moments when you’re not trying to force them into existence.

And the third was about success.

Perhaps the most interesting part of our conversation was Bruce’s admission that things only really started happening when he stopped chasing them.

No obsession with fame.

No obsession with validation.

No obsession with “making it”.

Just the work.

There is something refreshingly unfashionable about that idea in a world that constantly tells us to optimise, scale, hustle and grow.

Whether you’re building a business, writing a book, making music or simply trying to navigate life, the lesson feels remarkably similar:

Keep going.

Do good work.

Let success be a consequence, not the objective.

If this gave you something to think about, the full conversation is worth your time.

We go deeper into 25 years of persistence, what makes a great song, and why Bruce walked away from chasing success, and what happened when he did.

Watch the full episode here: https://www.thethirdhalf.uk/p/he-quit-chasing-fame-700000-fans

Scott

The Third Half

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Every now and then on The Third Half you meet someone who quietly challenges what success is supposed to look like.

Bruce Soord is one of those people.

If you know Bruce, you’ll probably know him as the songwriter, producer and creative force behind The Pineapple Thief. If you don’t, his story is perhaps even more interesting.

Because this isn’t the story of an overnight success.

It’s the story of someone who spent more than two decades steadily building an audience, releasing music, refining his craft and refusing to give up.

When we spoke for this month’s On The Turntable, Bruce was preparing for a run of solo shows while simultaneously finishing a new Pineapple Thief record. Slightly self-deprecating, and with tongue firmly in cheek, he described himself as “Mr Chaos” - the band member constantly juggling ideas, projects and last-minute inspiration while everyone else tries to maintain some semblance of order.

Yet beneath that chaos sits a remarkable consistency.

Twenty-five years ago Bruce stopped chasing the traditional music industry dream. No more hoping for the record deal, the big break or the executive who might magically change everything.

Instead, he focused on writing songs.

Ironically, that’s when things started to happen.

What followed was a conversation that went far beyond music.

We talked about creativity and why the best songs often arrive when you’re not trying too hard.

We talked about growing older and discovering that experience gives you something far more valuable than youthful ambition: perspective.

We talked about camper vans, the Jurassic Coast, switching off from work and finding stillness in a world that constantly demands attention.

And we talked about Ghosts In The Park, Bruce’s new solo album.

Written largely in hotel rooms while touring, the record emerged during a period shaped by loss, memory and family. Bruce spoke openly about the death of his father, his mother’s Alzheimer’s and the strange experience of watching life continue around you while your own world momentarily stands still.

Some of the most moving moments in our conversation came not from discussing music, but from discussing memory.

Towards the end of our conversation I asked him what success means now.

His answer was revealing.

Not chart positions.

Not fame.

Not streaming numbers.

The real excitement still comes from writing a song and knowing there’s something special in it. What he called “the magic”.

After twenty-five years, that’s still enough.

And perhaps there’s a lesson in that for all of us.

Stop chasing success.

Focus on the work.

The rest will take care of itself.

Enjoy the conversation.

Watch on YouTube | Listen on your favourite audio streaming platform:

https://player.captivate.fm/episode/761f9128-ccd7-4388-8962-60d44c0a5b39/

Scott

The Third Half

People. Planet. Progress

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