09/07/2009 – Phillip Holt's World

Today I start another trip to deliver trainings and workshops.

My first port of call will be Rimini in Italy to co-train with other Society of NLP trainers the Master NLP Practitioner course organised by NLP Italy.

To the disgust perhaps of some people, I have a couple of days off, and there is no point in returning back to the UK, so I may find myself in my swimming shorts, laying out on a sunbed on the beach, not looking at all the bikinis as they come back from a swim in the warm sea. No I will not be doing that, as I am sure my friend Alessio Roberti will find work for me to do.

I leave Rimini an the 20th, to go to Kuala Lumpa in Malaysia to deliver a workshop called Neuro-Linguistic Programming for Human Resource Professionals, and attend meetings, only to return to Italy to co-train in an NLP Practitioner course in Milan.

So I may be “off air” from my blog for a time, but I will be storing up experiences to write about soon.

It was about this time last year that using my peripheral vision, or Phillip’s Sausage, I spotted an unusual infestation of a an insect I had never seen before the Harlequin Ladybird. (click to read)

This Harlequin Ladybird was a very new species in the UK, and I would have thought I would have seen the same sight this year. But no.

I wonder what has happened to them?

Have they been eradicated?

Is the climate not suitable for them?

Is it the case of H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds?

Here the Martians are defeated when they invaded earth, not by man, but by tiny microbes, the red weed.

I was reminded of the past by an email I received from Vodafone Turkey, which showed a ladybird.

Vodafone Turkey
When my eyes saw the image, it passed the image to my visual cortex. My visual cortex, then said, “um, what is this I see”, and went on a transderivational search, searching for past experiences of images which matched the one I was seeing now. It went searching in the filing cabinets of my memories until it came up with a match or near match, and thus the Harlequin Ladybird .

Other memories came to mind from the advert, that of Malaysian batik printing.

Batik fabric
Batik fabric printing is an art form from South East Asia , especially Indonesia and Malaysia, where a cotton fabric, and traditionally the process requires that a line or a patch is placed or drawn with wax on cloth. This is done so that the surface is protected from the colour dye. The cloth is then dipped in the a dye, the colour dye does not penetrate the area that has been waxed. The wax stops the colour being absorbed into the cloth, therefore the surface is divided into dyed and un-dyed areas.

Strange how our mind works, and how memories come flooding back.