Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington
As the persistent warmth of this year’s autumn slowly draws away from us like a mysterious young woman in a silk cloak floating down the steps of the Palais Garnier into a waiting carriage, turning her head as she passes and idly dropping a single white rose, so winter trots towards us like a coach horse, its evenings dark like that maiden’s hair and its wood smoke and chestnuts warm with memories of times and places we have never known. As we drift through the new season’s bonfires and fireworks, Anna Moran and Andrea Gamson, far from the cool romance of Europe, its violins, its libraries and its traditional yeast baking, stride through the flat bread heartland of former British colonies, there to work in the tradition of their ancestors, mission-driven rather than missionary perhaps, but all the same organising as Victorian ladies used to organise, in Kenya and in India, for social good. In so doing they join in that recent, but already great, tradition of enterprise led by such luminaries as Tom Rippin, Jack Graham and Adam O’Boyle, by bringing together would-be entrepreneurs drawn from the excitable mass of socially ambitious graduates and filling them with passionate belief in such a way that positive impact flows like sparkling champagne over a pyramid of ventures and start-ups, stacked like crystal coupes on the ballroom table of innovation. And yet whilst mission and passion urge their footsteps onward, something of romance remains, and these our entrepreneurial women yearn still a little for a waltz in the arms of some mindful gentleman. Should you have a mind, you may apply to fill their dance cards here.