 When we moved here in 1991, my two daughters Hannah and Philippa were 13 and 9, and going to the British school was not an option in those days because I think the British school only took children up to the age of 15 or 16 and they completed what we call in the UK GCSEs. Without that to take their A-Levels, their sort of senior high school years, they would have had to go back to the UK and that was never an option, boarding school or anything like this. So we decided to put them into the International School of Manila, which was quite a challenge because it was essentially an American curriculum, very different ways of doing business, things that we would have taken for granted in a curriculum were all extracurricular activities. So that really was quite a stressful time and of course in those days they were being bussed every morning into Manila on a full-size bus, the kinder, the first school, middle school, high school, all on this one large bus that would set off at about six o'clock or so in the morning to get to Makati. Well the discipline of getting up and going to school every day certainly didn't do the girls any harm and I'll explain more about that in a moment but over the years the trip into Manila did become more challenging, they got rid of the big bus, they started putting the kids on coasters which certainly made getting through the traffic in Manila a little easier but then they started to build the Skyway and the other roadworks. So by the time our younger daughter, Philippa, finished school in 1999 they were leaving Los Baños at 4.30 in the morning. Phil was doing the International Baccalaureate Programme and had a lot of homework so leaving getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning, getting on the bus at 4.30, fortunately most of them used to take their blankets and pillows and curl up and go back to sleep. More difficult for me having got up at 4 o'clock to go back to sleep but anyway and then perhaps get home around about five or so in the afternoon, she'd go for a swim, she'd then have homework up until about midnight, four hours sleep back on the bus the following morning. This, I think for everybody, got a bit stressful so I think we all celebrated when in June 1999 she finished school. Well anyway, Hannah had finished school in 1995 and took her gap year, went back to the UK, studied psychology and anthropology for two years at a university and became rather disillusioned with the UK education system and persuaded us to let her move to the US in 1998, which she did, she went to St. Paul to Macalester College and graduated in 2000 top of her class. So and then went on and got a teaching assistantship at the University of Minnesota and completed her PhD in psychology in 2006, got married the same year and is now living in the US. Philippa finished and took a gap year, went to Canada for a year and then went to the University in Durham in the UK and what did she study? Psychology. So I'm not quite sure whether this was the Jackson experience or whether it was the Erie experience or a combination of all of the above but two botanists have spawned two psychologists and Philippa has just submitted the first draft of a complete PhD thesis and expects to get it examined in the next few weeks. So I think their academic success is also due to the discipline that they had to follow in essentially getting up, going to school, doing their work, etc. Also going to an international school I think it's quite competitive but Erie is also a very competitive place and I think we have probably higher than average attainment rates amongst our children at Erie. I'm not saying we put a lot of pressure on them but when you've grown up in a society where every neighbour is the father or mother of your parents, colleagues at work, most of them have got PhDs, there's a very high pressure environment to achieve and it's great to see so many of the children going off and achieving and so we're delighted that our two daughters are beginning to make their mark even though it's in a very different field from the one in which we ourselves train because what I hadn't said is that Steph, my wife, is also trained in genetic resources and she worked at the International Potato Centre for a number of years as well, an intense experience. Some colleagues wonder how I've been able to manage this sort of life work balance and I think that is extremely important that anybody that comes to work at Erie maintains a good balance between their work and their social life and I also intensely believe it's very important to have a private life and I remember when I came to Erie in 1991 and discussing with the then director general Dr. Klaus Lampe, I said eight to five, I'm Erie's, after five o'clock in the morning, in the afternoon, sorry, after five o'clock in the afternoon and before eight o'clock in the morning, that's my time and I share my time with the Institute on my terms and have maintained that over the time I've been here and have kept a private life which I think is also, you know, kept this balance very important. So what to do? Well, I had never thought in my life that I would ever go scuba diving but it was clear that, you know, with the coast so close we would go down and have a look and I'd never actually been snorkeling before I came to the Philippines and my first experience of snorkeling thought this is wonderful, I don't need to do anything else, I'll just snorkel for the rest of my time. But then Hannah took a dive course and in the early 90s there were large groups of staff that were taking the dive course together and so in 93 I thought well I'll give this a try and I haven't looked back and in just a week or so time I shall complete my 355th dive at Anilao. I've been diving there for 17 years and it's been a tremendous experience. I don't think I shall dive again unless I'm on holiday somewhere, it's not something I should do in the UK, it's too cold. But it has been a fantastic experience to take up scuba diving and again it's been a hobby through which I've met a lot of new people who just share that enthusiasm and in some cases passion for getting in the water and going down to 100 feet or so and seeing all this beautiful wildlife. The corals here in the Philippines and the fauna are just spectacular and it's been a great privilege to have been able to do that. In the early 90s as well there was a group of us that like to sort of drop our inhibitions a little bit towards Christmas and we had a few years when we had Christmas pantomimes. The pantomime is really a very strong British tradition. Rather outrageous entertainment, a short play, often based on a fairytale and we had a number of those in I think 93, 94, 95. A group of us got together, fortunately bolstered by some semi-professional support from Manila where they were the sort of, they provided the foundation around which the rest of us floundered and made complete asses of ourselves. But in doing so I think we, I think, well we certainly had a great time. We hope the audience did. The probably the most outrageous part I played was in the last pantomime I figured which was based on the story of Robin Hood and I played the part of Prince John. But I don't know how it developed but I ended up wearing a long blonde wig, extremely heavy makeup and being a dubious sexuality. But we had a lot, we had a lot of fun and we think the audience, the audience had a lot of fun and in some ways I've been involved in a number of things like that while I was an undergraduate performing short. It's a bit like, I don't know if you've heard of the Cambridge Footlights Review but you know in the university groups get together and they put on small reviews and plays and I sort of came out of that. I did some of that at Southampton. I also used to do a lot of folk dancing in my younger days before arthritis took over. I used to do Scottish dancing, more of a full kilt and English country dancing and also a type of dancing called Morris dancing which is just for men. Very traditional dancing going back a thousand years or more, wearing bells, waving handkerchiefs, hitting sticks etc and did that for maybe 30 years and I still have contacts with that back in the UK. I have a brother who was a professor of Geography in Canada and a couple of years ago or so he sent me an email message saying, oh you might be interested in the following and he'd been approached by the curator of what was to be a new museum in the city of Liverpool in the UK. Liverpool is the home of the Beatles and they were mounting an exhibition of various aspects of music around the the Beatles and what influenced them. During the 1950s there was a genre of music called skiffle and it was the sort of music that anybody can play. If you had a guitar and you had a t-chest bass which was essentially a t-chest with a string, you know anybody can play it and they wanted to illustrate how this sort of music was accessible to anybody and on my brother's website he is the webmaster for a jazz musician called Chris Barber who's been playing jazz trombone for 60 odd years and in one of the earlier incarnations of the Chris Barber jazz band was a musician who played the banjo called Lonnie Donningham who also was a solo musician who played skiffle and me and my brother at the ages of nine and seven whatever it was used to do this. My brother played the guitar and I played the t-chest bass well for some reason or other my brother had found a photograph of himself and myself entertaining my mother and a couple of friends and they got it on his website and through the internet images searched this curator of the museum had found this image and said this is exactly what we're looking for can we use it in the Beatles museum he said sure and as far as I know two years later there we are on a poster eight foot by five as young boys of nine and seven or whatever we were in the mid 1950s playing skiffle and of course then into the 60s 50 years ago the Beatles came along and I suppose that was a time when my interest in music really grew and I've become quite passionate about music I my house is not a happy house unless there's music playing and I have very broad taste in music but it's very very important part of my life yeah I've actually worked under five DGs at Erie in these last almost 19 years first there was Lampy Klaus Lampy who who hired me followed by George Roth Child Bob Havener as an interim DG Ron Cantrell and Bob Ziegler and they were all different very different and I suppose you can think about I mean it and the role of a DG in an international centre is very interesting role of the chief executive officer in any organization is very different I mean because it changes the nature of the organization I mean just to give you an analogy the US is a very different place under Barack Obama than it was under George Bush there are different things happening but the CEO sets the tone now I wasn't here when Klaus Lampy was was appointed that was what 88 or 89 but my understanding and recollections from talking to people in the early 90s is that Erie was not in a very healthy situation towards the end of the 1980s it had not received a very good review and it was clear that somebody had to come in and bring about some change and this sort of harks back to what I was saying about this sort of self-satisfaction aspect of the Institute that I have observed over the years and clearly the physical plant at Erie was deteriorating markedly so it Lampy came in with a mandate to bring about some significant change and he did some new buildings went up buildings were refurbished fortunately he was able to influence particularly the German government to support refurbishment of the facilities and there was a major staff change particularly in the senior levels and I think not just because I was part of that but I think it was very important for the organization because organizations can stagnate and you do need people to come in with new ideas new ways of doing things and I think the Institute has certainly benefited from the changes that Klaus Lampy brought about and you have to admire him for the changes that he made but he was quite a difficult person to work for I for the we overlapped for four years and I would say for over three years he and I had an excellent relationship working in genetic resources I was very much involved in the intellectual property management side of things and actually helped to draft the with somebody from Stanford University the first IP policy it was at a time when you know we had the Convention on biological diversity and there was lots of concerns about ownership of biological resources and lots of other and the CG was changing in this way and I used to interact with Klaus Lampy almost on a daily basis but Klaus was quite renowned for falling out with people quite dramatically and from one day to the next things could fall apart I saw this happen with quite a lot of colleagues and it eventually happened to me which I I wouldn't say I was bitter about I felt very sad about because it was absolutely nothing to do with the work that I was doing and I felt that was not an appropriate reason for shall we say a good working relationship to start to fall apart funny enough when when Klaus visited the Institute about a year ago or so he actually pulled me over into a corner and we talked about that period quite frankly and openly and agreed that it wasn't our finest hour and decided to put you know that behind us that the the the the positive aspects of the relationship were much more important than some negative things that that had happened and I think you have to give you know Klaus his due in that that he it took him a long time but I think he realized that perhaps he had upset some people more than he should have done and I think you also have to recognize that he brought about some significant change at the Institute positive change that the Institute really needed from his departure up until Bob Ziegler was appointed in 2004 approximately 10 years I personally think the Institute coasted without direction that may seem rather radical thing to say or controversial thing to say and when you have a vacuum like that the Institute the staff start to interpret where they think the Institute should be going because there's no central vision of what the Institute is all about so George nice person Ron good manager never presented their vision for Erie in my opinion and when we set up the DPC office and one of the one of the things we were keen to do was to try and bring some order it was like a phrase I've used for a number of years it was like herding cats everybody was off doing their own thing everybody had their own idea of what the Institute was about and I think the big strength that Bob Ziegler has brought to the Institute is that not only is a good scientist first rate intellect but he had a vision for what he thought Erie should achieve he may not be as good a manager per se as perhaps Ron Cantrell but he is he is I would say of the five DGs a leader in a way that the other four were not and in this phase of fairly rapid expansion and at a time when the Institute itself is under considerable pressure from outside forces within this whole change process of the CGR to have somebody who has got a vision and occasionally is not afraid of stepping on somebody's toes because he passionately believes in that vision and he's got the backing of the staff for that vision I think is a damn good thing so it has been different we've had Klaus had the leadership qualities but he had his flaws we had two managers I don't really count Bob Havener in this and Bob was a beautiful man he was the right person for Erie in that one year but he but when he came he did he sort of gave a vision he called the staff together and I remember him saying the following more or less and a paraphrase he said the Institute has to move forward as the interim DG I will make the decisions that need to be made and I will leave the decisions that can be left for my successor but make no mistake he said I may be interim but I am the DG I am the boss and please understand that and you got a sense of somebody who was very confident in the position he was in and was going to do the best for the Institute he certainly was a leader within the CG system I think with Bob the Institute is very fortunate to have a person of his caliber in the position he has in this period of change within the CG there was obviously he had realized within the overall management of the Institute there were there were some perceived weaknesses that that needed to be supported and needed change brought about and I wouldn't say we saw eye-to-eye on a lot of things but it was very much more a management perspective that he had rather than one as a visionary of where the Institute should be going and I think any any organization is better if you have somebody who is not only a good manager but has a clear view of where they want to take the organization you know when you think about the battles that have been won and the battles that have been lost people will follow sometimes unquestioningly a good leader when they understand what the Institute is trying to do and they also understand their part in achieving that vision and I think I personally think it's the role of a manager leader to be able to articulate that because if you do that you'll get the best out of the people that you're working with who was it was it George Bernard Shaw no man is an island I can't remember now but there's a saying no man is an island and I think one of this the the the the the difference between working in an international center and a university for example is that one is encouraged within the centers to work with others it's it's it's the name of the game it's rather different in the university it's a little bit more competitive everybody's off doing their own thing and I suppose I'm I'm the sort of person that likes to interact and work with others and and my career within the CG at SIP and at theory has allowed me to to do that and in different parts of the world I have to obviously think in terms of the person who supervise my my PhD Jack Hawkes I've just completed writing a small biography office of a university press publication and that was quite special writing that it was only 1500 words but to sort of condense somebody's life down into that and got me thinking about the sort of relationship that I had with him it wouldn't get away with it today I remember when when we sat down to discuss what I might do for my PhD he said Mike he said I think we I think we should work on the triploids there's type of potato and that was about it the rest was up to me to decide what I wanted to do nevertheless when I had done something and wanted to discuss it he was always there to give me very solid feedback on the ideas I was putting forward all the things that I had written and I think that has that has stayed with me stayed with me when I was supervising my own PhD students that you know that that relationship that you build with with somebody you're supervising is very important and I think it spilled over into the way that I've I've been doing people when they start to depend on each other that you know you it's sort of like a contract you don't want one side to of the bargain to let the other down as I said earlier on many of the people in the early years of the of the CG were pioneers in their own right about international agricultural research but in those days we weren't we weren't sort of restricted by a lot of the rules and regulations if I if that's the term that have seemed to have come in to guide how we do things I mean Dick Sawyer when he was hiring people he's okay I'll meet you in the the the passenger lounge in in in Frankfurt Airport for instance and he'd interview somebody there and make them an offer and he came to Birmingham he met me and he made me an offer and I moved to you know move to Peru so there's a lot more that has come in over the years that have you know constrict how we do do business probably in many ways for the better but the people that I worked with earlier on were pioneers within international agricultural research and and that was a fantastic experience I mean here at here at Erie I formed a close friendship with John Sheehy I think a kindred spirit I mean John Sheehy thinks out if to use a cliche thinks outside the box rather a lot and we all we also shared a keen interest common interest in wine over many bottles we have discussed the state of the world and state of agriculture agriculture research and I think it's great having a friend like that that you can you know there are no there are no boundaries you can sit down and and talk about what interests you what your concerns are about and I suppose over the years he has been my closest closest colleague although I've not actually worked with him professionally in the area of his work and I I've talked about working with the national staff in the gene bank and in DPPC but I think over the last four years some of the interaction that has given me the greatest satisfaction has in fact been the interaction with the people in your shop gene in in in in CPS I mean you've seen me over there quite a lot you know and and throwing out ideas and having people in in your shop who don't think I'm totally crazy and or maybe they do but taking some of those ideas and together we I think we have developed some fantastic products particularly the last two years of the annual report we I think we've I think we've pushed the boundaries there a little bit I think those were exciting interesting projects to have undertaken in our 50th anniversary year we've been working on stamps we've we've had a number of other things that you know and of course over the last 10 years we've been going to the annual the annual meetings of the CG and putting up an eerie booth and and and having your staff develop the materials based on ideas that we have we have developed together and there's no doubt about it the quality of materials coming out of CPS is top-class and that is been that has been a particular area of satisfaction there's one or two others that have been less satisfactory but not not from CPS I should have used and to add but but the interaction with CPS has actually given me a it's been a lot of fun and I've always believed that if you're not having fun don't bother doing it the offices round round here with the other staff in in DPPC you hear a lot of laughter and that's not because we're not serious about what we do but we have a very relaxed environment where we work together because we want to work together there's no hierarchy everybody understands where they are in the hierarchy but it's it's not an obvious hierarchy and we we have a lot of laughter a lot of fun together and I think that building of comfort levels also helps increase productivity and I've noticed over the years interacting with your staff they have become much more comfortable interacting with me which I think also leads to enhanced productivity I mean never ceases to amaze me and come up with an idea or I think we ought to do this and then you know that then you get a product back which just blows your socks off and that's tremendously satisfying I think Erie is extremely fortunate to have the staff that it has I mean if you if you compare the Philippines to a number of other countries it has a level of research support sophistication that you just don't find in other countries you've got an educational system it might be creaking a bit around the edges that is turning out competent people who are coming on to the job market you've also got here at Erie for good and for bad or for good and less good a workforce that has been committed over many many years to the Institute I mean I think some turnover is always good for any organization but you have people who have committed to the organization essentially for the whole of their career so there's that loyalty and it's a very strong loyalty but I think this also says something about the Filipino character I think the the one it's not really negative but it harks back to something I was saying earlier on I think it can sometimes lead to complacency that you know we are Erie therefore we are good and I've always said look we should not be saying we are good let others make those judgments you know obviously the the the the plaudits that the recognition that comes to Erie also spills over onto all of the staff we are the Institute is because of the staff and it's been extremely fortunate to to to have the commitment that it that it that it continues to enjoy certainly I could not have done what I was able to achieve in the gene bank and here in DPPC unless I had had good staff and I inherited a group of staff that were waiting to be given the opportunity to do something and to show what they could do in the gene bank I was given the opportunity here in DPPC to recruit the staff who I thought would make the best team so I have I have no no no real you know concerns there I was able to do what I wanted to do and get the people to help me do it contrary to common belief here I did not travel as much as everybody thought I did so and I've never felt that traveling for the sake of travel was was a worthwhile use of my time so whereas I've I visited all of the genetic resources programs in Asia and met the people and saw what they would they were about I never felt that just going there to sort of wave the flag and was was a was a useful thing to do so when we got the Swiss funded project five year biodiversity project 95 to 2000 and I had a good group of staff around me we essentially divided the countries up between us the the the the geneticist and the anthropologist Jean-Louis farm and Steve Morin they were working in the Philippines in Vietnam and in India so I thought well you know if you're going to those countries on a regular basis you can as it essentially be the liaison between GRC and the genetic resources programs there I concentrated on Indonesia and the Lao Democratic People's Republic where we had a staff member based Baurong Lu was collecting around many countries and Eves Laresto who had been here for goodness knows how many years nearly 40 years before she left about time she was sitting one of the old-timers she sort of concentrated on Nepal and Bhutan and Myanmar and you know so we split that that up between us one of the difficulties that the the and I and my contacts were with the genetic resources people and they were always under resourced and over ambitious because they saw Erie as the model to follow the classic example would be Myanmar where they had a facility goodness knows how many times bigger than the gene bank here and they did not have the resources to turn anything on essentially and it one of the things that I I tried to do working with them was to try to bring a sense of scale you know we have a gene bank of the type we have at Erie for for these reasons you know it's a long-term facility for the whole of rice germplasm if you're concentrating on the germplasm of your country there are ways of going about doing that which don't you require you to involve to invest several million dollars a year it's not necessary there are ways you can do things but there's always this and it's not just here in Asia it's around the world this feeling that you've got to build a gene bank and the first thing you say well if you haven't got if you haven't got the electricity to apply to turn the cold room on what what is the purpose of building a facility of this type there are there are better ways of achieving your your goals so that was a little bit of a once a tension but it was a difference of perspective and we were successful in some some in some countries and getting them to think in terms of a more sustainable approach in others it was it was a little more difficult but I always found the people that I dealt with a highly competent and extremely dedicated professionals and that was also a again part of the the the good interaction that I had joined my my days is a somebody working in a gene bank overrated I mean it was it was it was it was a political decision is it needed if it makes people feel good if it makes if it brings focus and attention to this whole area great was it absolutely necessary I personally do not think so because having that facility as such is not necessarily going to extend the life of the materials that are in it because a gene bank is like a computer junk in junk out so one of the things we did early on in my tenure and in GRC was to look at how we were producing seed to maximize the what their quality in terms of long-term survivability in cold store if you have seeds which have an inherently short shelf life either because of the nature of the material or because you haven't grown them and produced the seed in the right way prior to sticking them in a cold room sticking them in the Arctic isn't going to make any difference so from from the purely technical point of view I think Svalbard was an irrelevance from a political point of view it's probably a damn good thing but it would have been nice if well no things have changed I mean one of the reasons I was quite happy to leave my genetic resources work and this sort of goes back to a frustration now that I think about it was that genetic resources work was becoming less technical and more political you know with the Convention on biological diversity the Commission on genetic resources the the International Treaty on genetic resources for food and agriculture and the negotiations that were going on and frankly I have sat through days of negotiations in Rome at FAO when frankly having a frontal lobotomy would have been the most useful a useful asset but the interminable discussions over wording in square brackets in these international negotiations they put things in square brackets that are still being negotiated but in terminal but is discussions that really I don't think moved us moved us forward very fast in in our management of genetic resources and they're still negotiating things it's like all these international treaties maybe I'm being cynical but I was not sorry to give up that side of genetic resources and I remember about a year after Rory Sackville Hamilton my successor came maybe a couple of years and there was a board meeting here and I had to give a presentation or something to do with my work as a director but the the presentation to the board immediately before me was Rory talking about the the International Treaty and some of the implications for germplasm axon and I do remember saying is a sort of a preface to my talk to the board I'm glad it was Rory talking about those things and not me because of the very concerns I've just expressed it had become you know political rather than an interest in the germplasm as such we've been talking about the sort of the the various careers I've had which which is involved both research and administration I suppose on balance I've enjoyed more the managerial roles having said that you know I've I've been quite pleased with the the research output that we've had and we've had had published and I was checking my my publications list recently to check it was up to date and realized that of the almost 200 no it's it's over 200 communications refereed books etc over half of that has actually published while I was working in area at the gene bank so in a 10-year period was was really quite productive in terms of research output and some of it is I think has had a had a good influence and then another thing that we we published one of us still at the University of Birmingham which was a little controversial at the time we organized a small workshop in 1989 and the book was published in 1990 on genetic resources and climate change 20 years ago and okay there are skeptics now there were a lot more skeptics then it's a climate change no such thing and unfortunately the book I think was perhaps ahead of its time it's not been as widely cited as as it might have people are you know totally unaware that you know 20 years ago here was this book talking about pending climate change and ways to adapt to to climate change and that genetic resources and the exploitation of genetic resources collections would be one way of mitigating the effects of climate change so I think was quite a landmark publication at the time but has disappeared into the fog fog of obscurity when I moved into the DPPC position you know I started to see the the Institute and its management obviously from a very different perspective and started to build a relationship with the donors in a way that as a researcher you just don't have and and in the ten years there's been some quite marked changes in personnel in the donor community and it's quite a challenge constantly renewing that relationship with different donors and as new people come into the donor agencies perhaps and policy changes you're having to adapt to that and understand where their interests lie I also mentioned that I came into DPPC at a time when it was like herding cats everybody was interpreting their own thing and feeling also that everybody had licensed to go out and market whatever idea they had with the donors and I came in not long after I took over this position or established this position started to go and visit donors in fact my my first experience of meeting the donors and what their interests were directly was when I attended what was then the midterm meeting in Durban in May 2001 that was about two and a half three weeks after I'd assumed the position we flew off and it was thrown into this CGR CGR maelstrom of of meetings and coffee breaks and talking in the corridors and trying to get people interested in the Institute and I would say the majority of the people I met in 2001 are not in position today so you're constantly having to sort of renew that relationship and explain to a new group of people that comes through the donor agency what the Institute is all about now in 2001 I was essentially given full responsibility for interacting with the donors with the exception of two donors Japan because of the rather special relationship we've had with Japan and that's normally been handled directly through the DGS office and USAID because with the DG being a US citizen and and frequently going through the US it was felt that that was a more appropriate relationship so I started to develop an understanding of the European donors now although many of them are members of the European Union they also have their own individual policies and getting to try and understand that complexity was was quite daunting the one thing I came to realize is that Erie had probably probably been ignoring the donors to some extent and while the donors wanted us to go and visit they didn't want to be swamped so they they they wanted a focal point of contact they wanted somebody to come through perhaps once a year twice at most they certainly didn't want a constant stream of Erie staff turning up trying to sell an idea because the other thing that I came to realize is that for many of the staff working in the donor agencies the CG is a very very very small proportion of their overall responsibilities in some sense compared to what other to other responsibilities they have we're we're like a flea on a dog's back you know that that's the level of importance and yet major decisions about funding are made with somebody who's already thinking about half a dozen other rather more important things in terms of their own portfolio of responsibilities so getting to understand those dynamics I think was in was important but also as I've talked about several times in this interview is establishing relationships and getting to know who these counterpart people were so that a you go to a meeting you recognize them and they recognize you and you build a level of confidence that you can pick up the phone and know that somebody will talk to you or if you send an email you'll get an answer because they know who it's coming from and you've built that sort of one-on-one relationship and we've worked very hard at that and current has also been working hard at that and it has paid off one of the one of the most common things we have to do after we've got a contract up and running or a grant up and running is to ask a donor for a no-cost extension it's legit legitimate in most cases because there's always a a slow startup phase to a project and although a contract starts on this day it may be six months before you've got the staffing in place or what have you so there's always going to be a little bit of spillover beyond the normal contract dates and we found that with quite a number of donors now because we've shown that area is a reliable partner and has credibility that we do send in the documentation that they want that we do provide quality reports generally on time we can send an email in and most of our businesses in fact done by emails now there's hardly a document dissent by post it all goes in as file attachments we can often send a note into a donor in Europe towards the end of an afternoon here knowing it's first thing in the morning there and within half an hour or an hour have a reply back approved because they know us they know how we work we know what we're sending etc and I think that has been very very positive now since Bob Ziegler joined as DG and even more recently since Arkham Doberman became the DDG research they themselves have become much more hands-on in terms of donor relations making those visits etc and I've over the last couple of years sort of pulled out of that rather the more obviously still keeping a contact relationship by email but on personal visits I haven't done that for a while so that dynamic has changed within the Institute but it is important that that we still maintain that sort of focal point within the Institute and of course it was the DPPC office and will become the Office of External Relations in the future