Diversions Manifold

Saab cars went into bankruptcy just before Christmas. There is tons about it on the web, so I don't really need to describe the ins and outs of the long and painful slide from being sold by GM to Spyker and "Swedish Automobile," to the rather demeaning attempts at sale to the nobody Chinese firms Pang Da and Youngman. I'm writing about this now because I had to pop into the local Saab dealership in Ipswich to have an engine management problem looked at. (It turns out that the turbo vacuum hose had a small hole in the side, most likely caused by a marten, the famous "Marderbiss" in German.) I had to wait a while, just over an hour, for my car to be looked at and repaired, so I had time to sit in the upstairs waiting area to read a 1987 history of Saab-Scania, and to sit in the latest and last Saab, the 9-5 Aero turbo 4. The book was full of hope and pride of Saab Cars, noting its original raison d'être of being an emergency occupation for thousa

I mentioned that I am home for Christmas. This means that I am at my parents' house with my own family, having made it to England without a full passport. After the initial assurances that my passport would be ready for me well before our travel, I eventually received an email from the lady working on my case that it emphatically would not be ready. I would have to travel up to Düsseldorf to obtain an Emergency Travel Document (ETD) from the British Consulate in person. Actually, I was supposed to have gone to Munich, because that's where British citizens living in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are catered for (or "processed", I suppose). But, since Heidelberg is so much closer to Düsseldorf than to the Munich mother-ship, I went there instead. It was an early start, but the weather was good and I made swift process along the Autobahns. Having left at around six o'clock in the morning I arrived just after nine, after battling through the Düsseldorf rush-hour

Back at my parents' house over Christmas, I was (watch out, this is going to get exciting) doing the washing up after my sister had made the dinner. (Just to write "pork chops" does the meal an injustice, but that's basically what it was). The item I cleaned last, because it had now rather unappetising looking bits of wet pastry on it, was the beater from our old Kenwood mixer. As I washed, I remembered how this piece of utilitarian design had always fascinated me through its complexity and simplicity. It is designed as a 'K', instantly bringing the branding to the forefront. Whether or not this is optimal for mixing pastry I cannot say; but it works very well, generally resulting in great cakes, so its impact on the mixing dynamics of pastry is at least not negative. Its complexity is subtle, but everywhere present. It warps in all three dimensions, combining rigorous straight elements with beautiful curves, tubes with flat and developing blades. Some

Last week I was on a business trip to Genoa. I was there to represent the Technology department in the lions den of a quality managers' meeting, as I had been a few years previously in Liège and in Bielsko-Biala. This time around was somewhat more relaxed than the previous few. The quality team had finally accepted our way of working and come round to accepting our thinking behind the complex tolerancing on seemingly simple parts. And to accept the necessity of measuring what we make. Naturally, I had only a little time to experience Genoa itself.  My evening out with the team at a pizzeria in the port at least showed me the way down to the port, so when I escaped an hour earlier than required the next day, I was able to wander down for a quick look in the daylight. The Genoa that I saw had that certain Mediterranean lived-in grandeur that many Italian cities posess; fading architectural glories simply being part of the activity going on in and around them. At least

One of the lovliest traditions that I have come across is the Sankt-Martins-Umzug. Last night (13th Nov) I was reminded how wonderful it is with my eldest proudly parading her owl lantern through the streets of Wieblingen, down to the Kerweplatz where the Feuerwehr had installed a large bonfire and several stands were dotted around selling Bratwurst and Glühwein. Wieblingen Dorf was very well represented with lots of familiar faces as well as the small Blaskapelle playing the St Martin's songs in continuous loop.

Sport, whether played in a team or singly, is essentially a selfish pursuit. I want to get fit, I want to improve my flexibility and coordination, I want to forget work and - well, you know how it is sometimes - I want to forget the family. Lots of 'I's happen, in any case. Bringing up children ends up generating not a little internal tension between selfishness and selflessness, despite the best protestations of celebrities that it has finally taught them to think about others. It is also the cause of some sporting ingenuity.  For example, throwing an 8 kg baby around for a little several times a day helps to keep the upper body muscles active. Hauling two children and a child's bike in a bike trailer is good for the legs and stamina. Not just standing around in the swimming pool, but actively swimming and splashing around expends some energy. My evening rides around the block with the eldest, whilst fun, don't really count other than as chances to get some fresh ai

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),

I play trombone with the Musikfreunde Symphony orchestra in Heidelberg. We rehearse and perform along the university semester cycle, which leads to some intense periods of music; a welcome insight into the world of the musician, without having to be one. This semester we have been working on Dvorak's 9th Symphony, "From the New World", alongside Mussorgsky's "Night on Bare Mountain" and Bruch's Violin Concerto (no use putting any numbers there; he doesn't seem to have written anything else worth performing). We recently had a rehearsal weekend, immersing ourselves in music, and our first two concerts, successfully dispatched in Langenselbold (no, I had no idea, either) and Freiburg. Tomorrow night is our final, crowning concert in the Heidelberg Stadthalle. I want to write a little bit about the Dvorak. For me, it's easy to dismiss - it's popular, for a start, which always makes me suspicious - and even as I tried to disregard its popula

A few days ago I took part in my third BASF Firmencup at the Hockenheim Ring. It was my best so far, 25'29 for the 4.8 km track, a two minute improvement over last time, yet leaves me with an obvious goal for next year, to beat 25 minutes. Where does that stand in relation to the best runners? Well, the best in our group ran it in 19 minutes, and he was 200th or so. I was 2500th, give or take, and there were around 12000 participants, so I didn't do too badly. I definitely felt fitter than the previous two times, and I had more energy. Energy was the biggest realisation from 2010. That year I had trained reasonably well, but I made the mistake of eating nothing other than an energy bar from lunchtime. This year I ate well at lunchtime, but kept munching at various intervals (I was at work, it being a Wednesday). I also made sure that I was well stocked for the bike ride from Heidelberg Pfaffengrund, where I work, to the Hockenheim Ring. 2011 was also my first "race&

My stance on energy is an open one: I am for a mix of available technologies. Oil will remain a key component of transportation energy for years to come Coal should be wound down (very slowly) Gas and shale gas are interesting agents for energy balancing Nuclear should be the key base energy driver Renewables should be part of the mix but should nor cannot become dominant sources Local energy (on houses or in communities) are interesting distractions from the energy requirements of whole countries Efficiency drives are necessary (and result in fascinating technological challenges in themselves) but should not return us to the dark ages I will come back to each of these as I develop my own knowledge base. My key sources of information are the now classic Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by Prof David MacKay and Prof Barry Brook's Brave New Climate blog, which was a key resource for me in becalming the media panic that surrounded the Fukushima Dai-ichi crisis.

I wish... somebody had taught me how to breath much earlier; how important the body is to playing; that the lips are the gateway to the trombone, but that the work is done much earlier; how important the mind is to playing; how important relaxation is to playing; that the instrument should be brought up to my posture, not the other way around. These things I now realise and know intellectually, but they are not innate. Does it matter? Well, I am where I am with orchestra, and I don't necessarily need to be at a higher level... But I do dream of it sometimes. We can all dream.

My business trips are now rare in comparison to how things were a few years ago. I count myself lucky as this dip has coincided nicely with starting a family. So from monthly trips to Asia and almost weekly trips to Germany from the UK, I now occasionally fly to Italy to meet suppliers and drive around Germany meeting customers. And read bedtime stories. This week I ended up on a more unusual trip, to Dacia in Romania, to discuss some issues that they have been having in production. It was to have been a relatively relaxed journey, flying to Bucharest from Frankfurt airport early in the afternoon to stay in an airport hotel until my colleague from Turkey arrived early the next morning. Alas, though, systems happened. We have the Egencia travel booking system at work; it is the business version of Expedia. Egencia turned out to be a nightmare for rapid turnaround travel as it has an - in itself eminently sensible - approval system built in. The problem is that these approvals nee

Blogging is an art form. Examples abound of it being produced spectacularly well and spectacularly badly; as with all other art forms, it requires a certain discipline with quality control. So, with me swyping this entry on a mobile phone, can I do justice to the artistic endeavour? Surprisingly, yes. Whilst it is more difficult to see the overall picture or flow of what is being written, and more care is required for the input itself, if I can take time and care over it, saving it, re-reading it, tweaking it, then there is no reason for this document to end up qualitatively different to a blog written with a fountain pen and paper. I don't subscribe to the view that the care required for input amplifies the care taken in pre-selecting the word about to be written. Much more important is having the time available to concentrate on the content and avoiding distractions; even better than merely time is multiple times. The factor that most limits blog entries such this on my Mo

I came across this poem whilst researching for Diversions Manifold (research meaning the desparate search for inspiration for the name). But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For heaven and the future´s sakes. —Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time, st. 9

 I to do too many things without devoting sufficient time to any one of them to become particularly good at it. Business, engineering, playing trombone, biking, singing, being a Dad, being a husband - and now blogging. So why should I harbour this conceit of publishing my thoughts? And why should you want to read them? The answer to the first is fairly clear - I want to force myself to think again, something that I have not truly done since university. Egotistically, I want to push the results of these thoughts onto the web in order to force myself to find the right words, and to get as close as I can to a truth, however limited. To the second question - why should you read this - I hope you have the answer. My hope is that some of what I write strikes a chord of recognition, a feeling of “Mitmensch” - being related in this form of humanity - and that it creates a little frisson of expectation that more is to come. Perhaps we share some interesting thoughts, perhaps we're pole