This flotation presents a new calculus in investment management. One is also familiar: I can’t remember what the advertisement is advertising The second is that things are not always what they seem. Doubtless many readers will be familiar with the television advertisement where the youth snatching up the dropped purse from the pavement is intent on returning it to its owner rather than diverting its contents to his own use There are at least two morals to this. In no other part of the UK are the consequences of political failure so serious. The prize is great: a more open, self-confident, cosmopolitan, vibrant North, with different perspectives and different goals, equipped to stand more on its own feet, able to offer new opportunities and new horizons to a new generation – with all this implies for political development and stability.This is an edited version of a presentation made by the chairman of Bombardier Aerospace Northern Ireland at a recent meeting of the International Advisory Board of the INM Group.

What happens will be limited by the extent to which one part of the island is fixed in the position of minor economic partner with an inherently weaker economic structure. But take the tax differential out of the investment equation and Northern Ireland would derive immense advantage from sharing the island with a state which is already so globalised.This is not a zero sum game. An economic cluster growing from the soil of the whole island and deriving strength from the capacity available in both parts enhances the ability of both to participate to the full in the global trade and investment flows.The benefits to the UK national interest of a stable, prosperous Northern Ireland are self-evident. Here Henry and Anna shared many treks and climbs, on one occasion being woken by a leopard entering their tent in the middle of the night (on another occasion Henry, alone in the bush, was very lucky to survive a buffalo attack). It was on that same 1949 trip that Anna discovered an old Huntley & Palmer biscuit tin in a cave and, on opening it, found inside the skull of a local Bakonzo tribesman, who had died of altitude sickness on an earlier expedition. Anna promptly developed a fever and had to be evacuated from the mountain, trussed up in a blanket slung from a pole.In 1952 Henry Osmaston took part in an Anglo-Belgian scientific expedition to the Ruwenzori – the biggest since Alexander Wollaston’s and the Duke of Abruzzi’s pioneering ventures of 1906. It was whilst building the Elena Hut in 1951, in preparation for the expedition, that Osmaston with Richard McConnell did the first recorded skiing on the then large snowy expanse of the Stanley Plateau; the first formal “championship” followed in 1958.Osmaston’s Ugandan tour came to an end in 1963, soon after Independence.

Reflecting 40 years later on the handover of power, he regretted that his British peers had not foreseen the speed and suddenness of Independence; he also felt that they had not coped successfully with the traditional dominance of the kingdom of Buganda. However, he felt generally proud of his achievements and from a distance watched in horror as one of the most stable, self-sufficient, well-governed countries in Africa was torn apart, first by Milton Obote, then by Idi Amin and then again by Obote.Back in Britain, Henry Osmaston reinvented himself as a lecturer in Geography – a subject suited perfectly to his insatiable, eclectic curiosity. His entr?to academia was a DPhil thesis at Oxford, analysing past climate and vegetation changes from pollen samples in mud cores bored from the fathomless bogs of the Ruwenzori. His supervisor said it was the best DPhil he had ever read and Bristol University offered Osmaston a job in its Geography department, where he remained a lecturer until his retirement in 1988.As a geographer he had two paramount qualities. One was his love of real, physical, hands-on fieldwork, preferably in mountain environments; the other was the astonishing breadth of his interests, all backed up by copious, meticulous research.A chance conversation with a colleague, John Crook, during a tedious departmental committee meeting, led to his being invited on Crook’s 1980 Indian-British study of life in Zanskar, the inner kingdom of the northern Kashmir province of Ladakh, known traditionally as “Little Tibet”.

As Osmaston combined geography lecturing with running a dairy farm at Winford, near Bristol, he was invited to Zanskar as “farming expert”. And to Zanskar he kept returning, often with teams of students, making comprehensive studies of traditional Tibetan-style agriculture, but also climbing peaks to embrace his geomorphological interests. This work culminated in 1994 with his publication, with John Crook, of the 1,029-page-long Himalayan Buddhist Villages: environment, resources, society and religious life in Zangskar, Ladakh.I met Henry Osmaston in 1985 when he joined our Alpine Club Indian-British expedition to explore the Rimo mountains in northern Ladakh. Henry could not fly out with the main party because he was still supervising exams in Bristol, and from Leh I had to send a telegram announcing that, alas, he would not be able to join us: our mountains rose off a tributary of the Siachen Glacier, where Indian and Pakistani artillery were busily shelling each other on the world’s highest battlefield. The Indian authorities were adamant that no one outside the main, escorted party could enter the war zone.Henry ignored the telegram and, armed with a letter of introduction from Cousin Gordon (the former military survey director) and a sheaf of US satellite photos (much coveted in those days of strained Indian-US relations) he bluffed, cajoled and charmed his way up through Kashmir, over the world’s highest road pass, the Kardung La, into the restricted Nubra valley, on to the Siachen Glacier, and then up the tributary Rimo glacier, surviving on an emergency supply of biscuits and Anna’s home-made marmalade.I was returning from an unsuccessful attempt on the summit of Rimo I one evening, walking across the glacier towards base camp, when I stumbled across a traditional wood-shafted ice axe, labelled H Osmaston, lying on the ice.