David meets Goliath...

The other day I was in a meeting of the Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change; this may sound interesting, but it’s normally rather unspectacular. But I had been looking forward to this meeting for quite a while as the host city of the 17th Conference of the Parties in South Africa (for all non climate-change buffs, this is following on from the COP 15 in Copenhagen) would be announced! The choice was between Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban…

Unfortunately I cannot tell you where it is going be as the host city will only be publicly announced by Cabinet in mid November, but let’s just say that I may well have a very good instinct...

As we were discussing the implications of this – still top secret – information, a couple of maintenance guys walked into the conference venue and started to water the flowers. Scared that confidential information might leak out, the speaker, a high ranking official from the Department of Environmental Affairs, stopped talking and switched off the projector.

She asked the guys to please come back later.

They continued to water the plants – plenty of water for every single plant.

She asked them to hurry up.

They carried on picking out dead flowers - one at a time, lovingly rearranging the remaining ones.

She asked them to postpone their task as they were interrupting an important meeting.

And finally one of the guys turns around and says:

“Eish, Lady, don’t you know that flowers are important?”

We couldn’t stop laughing about this beautiful clash of the maintenance guy and the Government official: One trying to save every single flower and the other trying to organise the world’s most important climate change conference!


PS: This post may have been a bit delayed… and they actually announced the host city yesterday. According to Wikipedia, “the 2011 COP 17 is to be hosted by South Africa. It is likely that the event will be hosted in Cape Town, with all required venues within the Central City.”

This is a beautiful example that Wikipedia isn’t always right… for the COP is actually going to Durban!

Cape Towns’ response was rather grumpy:
“The South African Cabinet announced rather strangely yesterday that the 2011 UN Climate Change Conference will take place in the KwaZulu-Natal province. It’s a disappointing outcome for Cape Town, especially as the UNFCCC site inspection did not take place as promised. In fact, the whole bid process has been less than satisfactory from a transparency point of view.”