Diversions Manifold

I'm not a morning person. It'll be a recurring theme of mine, especially, I suspect, when we experience at first hand the tyranny of the German school day (starting before 8am? Pointless). However, I simply wanted to record here how wonderful it is when our baby daughter starts her day and ours with a great big smile at us. That's it. Thanks!

On Saturday we decided to cycle into town. Our three year-old (coming on four) had her new bike, our three month-old hovered in her hammock in the Chariot cycle trailer. The sun shone and we rolled into Heidelberg happy and proud. Then we went shopping. On a Saturday. It was of course very busy; we knew that it would be and planned for a nice hot chocolate reward in Schiller's . In our experience it had been an oasis of calm where one could take time to enjoy a nice or unusual (sometimes both) hot chocolate and a home-made cake. Unfortunately, Schiller's has become too popular. We were able to sit down and order, but the level of noise in there was unbearable. Our baby added to that by crying and not being able to settle for a feed. People looked at us, we looked at them. We paid for our chocolates and left as quickly as we could, not having enjoyed it at all. There was music beating in the background and conversation was stuck in a feedback loop of ever-increasing volume.

Yesterday I was in Maastricht for lunch. I felt no urge to blog about it; which itself is good cause for a short blog post. Maastricht is a lovely city, full of Dutch and European styles. It has a grown-up feel to it; calm, confident, aware of its place in the world. It has its own identity and is full of culture. Its political status is well concealed from the average tourist - there are no huge European institutions in the centre to remind the Maastricht Treaty , for example (although there are some suspicious-looking buildings further along the river). But I didn't particularly want to blog about it, in direct contrast to Naples. It simply didn't raise as many emotions. I certainly know where where I would prefer to live, of the two, where I could bring my family - I also know where I would prefer to visit...

05.10.2011 Put short, Naples could easily be described as a characature of Italy. Take for example and especially the motorcyclists on the Tangenziale; one sitting upright at the handlebars in order to have both hands free for his mobile phone, another gesticulating whilst talking into his (at least hands-free) helmet headset. The cars jockeying for position in the clogged city arteries (using my Milan driving mantra of knowing where everything is, but pretending that you don't). The wonderful weather, the port smell and the smog over the city. The sheer number of people out and about in the centre - the life - on a Tuesday evening. The wonderful dinner (fish and fruits of the sea) in an unassuming restaurant near our hotel in Pomigliano. The 'man bags' (handbags for men) and the big sunglasses. It was all there. From the strucutre of a typical blog, I would now normally explain here all the very good reasons why Naples isn't a characature of Italy; there simply aren&

04.10.2011 Thoughts on a plane - I am of course referring to the prosaic (but amazing) technical achievement of the aeroplane, rather than to otherworldly spheres of thought. I am flying in an Airbus A321 from Munich to Naples. A three-generation Italian family is in constant sound and motion in front of me. The children are getting bored now that the afternoon snack is finished; I have my headphones on, listening to Carl Craig & Moritz von Oswald's Deutsche Grammophon Recomposed mix of Ravel's Bolero (mashed with Mussorgsky); I'm relaxed and in a good mood, so the children aren't too annoying. The Italian next to me is reading his Reppublica. I am tapping away on the virtual keyboard of my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7", hitting the 'delete' button more than anything else. Really I don't have anything to say for this blog entry; this is just something to keep me occupied until the fasten seatbelts sign is switched on and we have to switch off our elect

04.10.2011 I'm in Frankfurt airport awaiting my flight to Munich and then on to Naples of which I will of course see very little, this being a business trip for meetings with Fiat tomorrow. It's a lovely day, the airport isn't too busy this lunchtime and it feels invigorating to be on the move again. I almost wrote 'good' there, but I can't catagorically state that it is good in itself. Yes, we're supporting the customer even better than can be expected (the presence of an 'expert from Germany' lends weight to our arguments) but there's nothing coming up that my Italian colleagues cannot sort out by themselves. And it'll be the first time that my wife will have to put both daughters to bed by herself - not a task to take lightly with a three year-old and a two month-old. Of course it'll all work out, but the first time is naturally the most stressful. In both senses, then, it's of limited virtue but it's still a bit of a nice

There is an intriguing little phrase I came across in a trombone technique book that hovers in a limbo between right and wrong: "It's not what you play but how you play it" There is a lot to be said for giving your best at all times, no matter what music you have been asked to play. It is a matter of pride, of professionalism, of maturity - of character, too. I can certainly say that I gave my best to (and received a lot back from) playing in a Shropshire brass band, even though I really do not like much of the music we played. However, one cannot really be expected to be able to find one's best when playing the wrong sort of music for you. The talent isn't there, the fluency goes, the "Selbstverständlichkeit" is lost. Asking a striker to play in defence can work, but, if it goes on for too long, his motivation will drop to the extent that he becomes a liability, or he will ask to leave the team. And so I come to PPAPs. PPAPs are the scourge of th

The other night I was reading my 3 year-old a bed-time story from one of our favourite series of childrens' stories, Arnold Lobel's "Frog and Toad" collection, when this little exchange between the two got me thinking: {Frog's List has blown away in the wind} "Hurry!" said Frog. "We will run and catch it." "No!" shouted Toad. "I cannot do that.! "Why not?" asked Frog. "Because," wailed Toad, "running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!" This resonates with so much of business life; procedures, workflows, instructions, audits, filling out forms. We all have lists of things to do, from our (largely ignored and occasionally conscious-pricking) task lists, to those procedures.  We need to realise that we can make the choice between "merely" following the procedures to the letter, and rehumanising them. Naturally, this all applies to the bur

I returned to work yesterday after two months off on paternity leave following Emily's birth in July. Those two months of wearing shorts, not trousers, T-shirts not shirts were (Emily's virus aside) wonderful. Towards the end of my leave, I started thinking about and investigating the world of work again - discovering interesting buzzwords like "social enterprise" and "curation" brought up concepts that I was keen to try to implement in our office. I also checked my work emails to make sure that I wasn't going to be overwhelmed when I got back. Whilst checking up on my work emails from home, I noticed a slight reaction of repulsion as soon as I saw a drawing of one of our tube products - this continued when I returned to being "live" at work, too. It's not the greatest sign for motivation, although the holiday blues are bound to be at work. I fear my lofty ideas will not survive being dragged down to the product level, into the muck and

Music purists will tell you that electronic notation in general, and copy-paste in particular, is the scourge of music. Hit the Cntrl-C / Cntrl-V combinations (or their Mac equivalents) and you've increased the length of your piece at no extra cost. Most people would probably want to hear that riff again, anyway. Composers of old didn't have software to facilitate it, so perhaps they had to invest more thought into repetition; but they could equally well pencil in the double bar lines with bracketed ends, likewise at little cost and to the same effect: play that bit again (I think it's cool). Everybody has done it, from Bach (whatever his variant of 'cool' was) to Burt Bacharach. Used by master and novice alike, repetition is not necessarily a reflection of competence; indeed, repetition is a nearly inescapable component of music. Like most of music, though, it is incredibly difficult to do right and at the right time. Context is a key component in any decisio

Caffeine doesn't taste of anything. Extracted, it's a tasteless, dull white powder that has some resale value for caffeine pills and caffeinated drinks thanks to its stimulant properties. In other words, it doesn't add anything to the taste of coffee. As everything else in this world, it is a chemical, one that can be analysed and understood - and can therefore be targeted by other chemicals or processes for removal from its carrier. The most interesting carrier of caffeine is, of course, coffee. Whilst tea is a culturally vital plant that also contains caffeine (roughly half the quantity of coffee when comparing the the drinks), coffee has a deeper culture of drinking for stimulation of the body rather than of conversation. Decaffeination , whether by carbon filter or using solvents such as methylene chloride or ethyl acetate (the latter of which exists in fruits such as apples and pears, leading some marketers to refer to a "natural" decaffeination process),