A meeting at the MOD, a mysterious flower that has sparked legends, and a spreadsheet demonstration with a coffee and a croissant

Posted on 28 March 2024 by Carla Francome

We had a good day in the Central London sunshine this week! Our COO John Hayden jumped on a train to London early in the morning on Wednesday as he had an important meeting at the Ministry of Defence. I met him at Waterloo, and as we took a stroll across the Thames, the sunshine was glittering on the water, it was delightful. From the bridge, you could see the Ministry of Defence building, and there was a large ship in front of it, which appealed to John, with his navy connections.

John needed to catch up with various people at the MOD. They adopted LinkSpace several years ago, and are still happily using the software. John was meeting an employee who already uses LinkSpace to check in, and was going to show one or two others how to transfer data into the programme from another spreadsheet.

After crossing the river, we strolled through some immaculately kept public gardens. John told me that he loves walking around London as he always spots something new. He noticed a very distinctive plant, which has a flower that points to the ground, and has a crown of vegetation on top. We hadn’t seen anything like it before, and John decided to look it up on his plant-identifying app, “Picture This”. It turns out that it’s a Crown Imperial, which is a species of Fritillaries. It originated in the Middle East, and was one of the first ornamental species to be cultivated by humankind.

We thought this was all very interesting, and people on X (formerly Twitter), were ready with more information.

John Williams @TVJohn56 said that he’d read somewhere that “fritillaries are the only plant in nature to have a checkerboard pattern flower”.

We can’t see a checkerboard pattern on Crown Imperial, but certainly one species of Fritalllary, the Snake’s Head, can have a checkerboard (or snakeskin pattern) on its petals, as you can see in this article…

As a result of this square pattern, the Snake’s Head Fritillary is often known as a “Checkered Lily Flower”.

Christopher Lang @Langoo wrote, “Legend has it the flower formed from a beautiful queen accused of infidelity. She wondered around, outcast and crying so much that she shrunk to the size of the plant and in her final moments alone took root in the soil”. Crikey.

The distinctive flower has certainly invited a lot of rumour and story about how it came to be. One popular legend, written about in the article below, was that: “the Crown Imperial was once pure white and grew in the Garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus was arrested, every flower in the garden bowed it’s head – but not the proud Crown Imperial. When Jesus reprimanded it for its pride, it bowed its head, blushed deeply, and wept”.

And, it seems Christopher Lang was right, as another legend is written about in this same article: “The crown is explained in the legend of a Persian queen who was cast out after being unfairly accused of infidelity. The beautiful queen wept and wept. She cried so much that she actually shrank in stature. She wondered for a long time, and when she finally stopped walking, she became rooted into the ground and transformed into a flower – still wearing her imperial crown”.

Whatever the real story, it was wonderful to see something so exotic-looking on a spring day in London.

John had a fruitful meeting behind the MOD’s dramatic windows.

Relatively new users of LinkSpace told John that it’s “highly configurable, and its ability to manipulate data is good”. Someone else said that “It’s more user friendly than other systems”. And another said that “the knobs and controls you have to tweak make it easy to fine-tune the views of the data”.

An employee who has been using LinkSpace for a while said: “It’s a quick and easy way to know what is happening at any given time, and it’s really configurable to look at just the bits you need. Previously, when doing budgets, people were keeping individual spreadsheets, so you were having to wait for them to come back from leave and could never look back and see the history. This works so much better”.

John was delighted to hear that our software was working well for everyone there.

Over an afternoon beverage, John talked me through one of the advantages of LinkSpace with some unusual props- a croissant, a coffee and a cardboard knife.

He explained that these all represented data in a company. So let’s say it’s a huge place with three departments, one with lots of data on croissants, one with data on cardboard knives, and one with data on lattes (I want to work at this business in the croissant department!)

Now - with a regular type of spreadsheet, all departments can see all the data and frankly it’s too much isn’t it! If you’re in the coffee department, do you really want to see 10,000 pieces of data on croissants? No you don’t! (As much as we all love a croissant 🥐)

One advantage of LinkSpace, John explained, is that you can have a huge sheet of data, and each department only needs to see what’s relevant to them. So the cardboard knives team could happily just look at data on that, and wouldn’t need to give two hoots about the data on lattes. This is a handy function isn’t it! Everything would be separate, more like this.

LinkSpace has lots of great features, I’ll be explaining them over the coming weeks, hopefully with more and more elaborate props!