Passacaglia and Fugue

At last, a return to northern Europe, although we decided Hamburg was far enough to justify a flight over Eurostar.

Saturday 14th: It's a prompt start but not an absurdly early one. The traffic is light and we get to the pre-booked parking on time. At Terminal 5 the baggage drop for our flight has not quite opened. The flight is a bit delayed but overall it's nothing to be that bothered about. There's an AI fail when Google tells us that Hamburg public transport operates a contactless TfL-style system; it's not true. But the ticket machines take card payments and the S-Bahn is efficient, if busy. After check-in at the hotel we take a wander around the city centre.

Chilehaus; Sprinkenhof

Sunday 15th: This is the one day with a poor weather forecast, so a good choice for indoor visits. We begin at the Kunsthalle, which has a newly-opened exhibition on surrealism. The works are interspersed across several floors, together with the permanent collection. Later we visit the Museum für Kunst un Gewerbe.

Model Ship at the Museum fur Kunst un Gewerbe

Monday 16th: Many museums are closed, so we choose carefully and go to the Maritime Museum. The collection is spread over nine floors and is indeed vast. So many model ships... but some are more interesting than others; my eye is caught particularly by the Polynesian catamarans. It feels perhaps that they acquired this space and then wondered how to fill it: Sections on sail shapes, ropes, materials, warfare, exploration, uniform, and art. After lunch we take in the St Nikolai Memorial; if the view from the tower is indifferent, the subterranean exhibition on the 1943 bombing raids and firestorm certainly makes an impression. Later we visit the Rickmer Rickmers, a rather odd iron-hulled sailing vessel from the late 19th century, and finally the Alter Elbtunnel, a pedestrian and bike tunnel under the river.

Lego model of the Queen Mary 2

A 4-rotor Naval Enigma machine

Tiling in the Alter Elbtunnel

Tuesday 17th: After battling the Deutsche Bahn app, we set out for Lübeck. The St-Annen Museum is variable, but an extraordinary instrument is to be found within: a Great Bass Shawm, of which there are reckoned to be only five in existence (which justifies the rubbish photo, as it's unlikely I will ever see one again).

Great Bass Shawm

By lunchtime, I realise I can no longer deny that I'm feeling under the weather, but we carry on. The Günter Grass Museum isn't that interesting to me, but there's a surprise bonus that, at the rear, it is connected by a short garden to the Willy Brandt Haus, and that's more interesting. Finally we take in the Europäisches Hansemuseum, which is quite labyrinthine.

On return to Lübeck station, we board a train. It does not leave on time. After about 10 minutes, there is an announcement. We don't catch much of it but it's clear that it is not good news and it sounds like the emergency services are attending an incident at Reinfeld. Another half hour or so passes, without much information. Even the Germans are a bit restless by now. I check for other options and find we can catch a FlixBus about an hour later. We decide to book that; then I'm informed that the bus itself is running an hour late. There are a lot of people around and although people are trying to be helpful, no-one seems to have much idea what's going on. Rail replacement buses are mooted but there's no sign of them. We decide to stick with the booked bus and when it does arrive, eventually, we feel a bit calmer about getting back to base, but it's been less than an ideal day.

Wednesday 18th: After breakfast I take a Covid test and, unsurprisingly, the result is positive. There are no restrictions, but I feel there is an ethical dimension as well as the obvious selfish practical concerns. At least we brought FFP2 masks, so I'm using that indoors for the rest of the trip. We take a more leisurely pace and go to the Brahms Museum and the Komponenistenquartier, where we learn about Telemann, CPE Bach, the Mendelssohns, Mahler, and Johan Adolf Hasse. "Oh yes, everyone has forgotten about him", says the museum guide. I buy a CD to mark my discovery. In the afternoon it's the ethnographic museum MARKK Museum am Rothenbaum, which seems to feel woke enough to excuse some of its exhibits, but not enough to remove or reset them.

Brahms's Piano; Mahler's Bicycle

Thursday 19th: The worst of the fever is past, and we venture to Bremen. They say UK rail ticketing is Byzantine, but the Germans seem to be our equal; it's as if it was a different train operator. We wander around the town centre, and in the afternoon visit the Kunsthalle. As elsewhere, there are quite a lot of notices about how museums are trying to ensure the provenance of their works, and make any necessary restitutions of wartime-misappropriated works. Unusually, there's an interesting contemporary film running in the museum, of a concrete boat from the Third Reich, now abandoned and decaying on a sandbank. It seems an appropriate metaphor for the far right: ugly, rotten, but difficult to destroy.

The Musicians of Bremen

Friday 20th: R is now unwell too. Based on timing, I believe I contracted Covid on my last visit to London (there were an awful lot of coughing people on the train that day); it's possible I have passed it to him, but that seems quite quick after developing symptoms, and there were also people coughing on the plane. Anyhow, we wander around the city centre again in the morning, including a return to the Dammtorpark.

Japanischer Garten

In the afternoon, we take a shorter trip to Lüneberg, which is pretty. The Nazi surrender took place at Lüneberg Heath, a few miles distant, and it's easy to imagine Monty turning up, saying "I say! This is a damned pretty spot. Let's have Jerry surrender here!" It probably wasn't quite as simple as that.

Lüneberg

Saturday 21st:A short morning in the city centre, before it's time to head back to the airport. The return flight is smooth, although the baggage reclaim at Terminal 5 takes more than an hour for reasons unknown.

Book Review: Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, by Alexander McCall Smith
So, after re-reading the series so far and de-duplicating the second-hand copies I bought by mistake, I returned to the travails of Mma Ramotswe. As usual, the agency's cases are more often puzzles and problem-solving than crimes, but right now seems at least as good a time as any for a bit of light escapism. The ladies are investigating possible match-fixing in one of the local football teams, and they find themselves with little background knowledge to fall back on; meanwhile, one of Mma Makutsi's fellow alumnae from the Botswana Secretarial College (who scored much less than 97%) is up to no good. This is a series that makes most sense from the start, so I imagine the audience has become self-selecting by now.

Yesterday we went to the British Museum's Hiroshige exhibition. Like pre-Raphaelites, I tend to think that Japanese prints are a money-spinner for museums and galleries. This one was reasonably busy but hardly packed. For the most part, the pictures are enchanting landscapes, townscapes, birds and flowers. There's a fair amount of background and technical information included, such as the reuse of woodblocks with different colourations to produce prints from the same master indicating different times of day or season, or simply to cater for changing tastes. I found the depiction of rain particularly interesting, a heavy diagonal overlay that sometimes almost looks as if it has been scratched into the print. One or two prints of actors or courtesans reminded me of the Edo Pop exhibition from last year, and in the section on Hiroshige's legacy there was also a reference to the Yoshida dynasty.

Mount Fuji and Otodome Falls

Cherry Blossoms on a moonless night along the Sumida river

Pheasant and Chrysanthemums

First Shono from Fifty-Three Stages of the Tōkaidō

Portrait of Hiroshige by Kunisada

Book Review: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
This was a random discovery in a National Trust second-hand bookshop, although I'd already been aware of it and was mildly curious. Klara is an Artificial Friend - we don't get many details, but enough to confirm a human form - and the story begins in a shop where she is for sale. Eventually she encounters teenager Josie, and her mother buys Klara for her.

Josie is home-schooled and sometimes ill, and Klara spends some time caring for her among other activities. Klara meets the neighbours. Josie's parents are separated, but eventually Klara meets Josie's father.

There are many twists in the story, and the ending was, for me, unexpected. Throughout, there is a combination of humanity and dystopia. It's accidental: no-one is seeking to be evil, but everyone is living through the consequences of their and others' actions.

( Spoilers )

Book Review: Floyd Uncorked - A no-nonsense guide to French wine, by Jonathan Pedley with Keith Floyd
This is a TV tie-in book from a Channel 5 series, published in 1998. Plainly the writing is mostly by Jonathan Pedley, but the serious business of French wine is lightened by Floyd, who adds a handful of recipes. It's an informative book, covering wine regions and grapes, and also the growing and producing processes. The format is a bit uneven, with sidebars on topics appearing at random, and although the chapters are structured geographically, there isn't a clear pattern. The recipes are interesting but I'm not sure all of them are practical, particularly in smaller quantities. But it was good fun to read.

Yesterday we had a quick post-work dinner at Erebuni (which I'd previously visited in 2017) - this time I had the Armenian dolmas - before heading over to the Barbican for a concert given by Jordi Savall (whom I'd previously seen in 2014) and Hespèrion XXI. The programme was inspired by the travels of Ibn Battuta, and as such ranged from Morocco across the Mediterranean, north and east Africa, the Near and Middle East, the Black Sea, India and China. Loosely following his travel writing, with a narration given by Assaad Bouab, the programme also included references to contemporary historical events such as the outbreak of the Hundred Years War and the coronation of Pope Benedict XII. I'm not a great fan of the amplification used but in a large venue, it is a practical necessity for a band such as this. Savall's recordings always feel eclectic and well-researched, and though the geographic spread of these works meant that some of the concert arrangements featured unlikely combinations of instruments, there was an essential sense of authenticity.

Book Review: The Primacy of Doubt, by Tim Palmer
Poor Michael Fish. He will be forever remembered as the forecaster who dismissed the possibility of a hurricane hitting the UK in 1987. He features prominently in this book, but not alone. Ironically, the Met Office was developing its own ensemble forecasting at the time, and running the data with hindsight through those models, the forecast was unusually chaotic and unpredictable.

Palmer's career has weaved between quantum physics and meteorology, and I suppose it's therefore natural that he finds the connections between those two topics. "Sensitive dependence on initial conditions" - the unpredictability popularly known as the butterfly effect - features large, and is well explained. The solution - at least as far as understanding the potential for error in a forecast - can often be to run an ensemble model, with a range of close but not identical initial conditions, and consciously to throw in a bit of noise, to discover whether the predictions lie on a smooth part of the phase space, with little variation, or in a more chaotic realm.

Palmer stretches out into other areas more or less connected to the above, such as climate change, the Covid pandemic, and economics. In the first two areas, scientists find this approach useful: it indicates the degree of uncertainty in predictions, as well as showing plausible worst cases. There's an amount of separation here between science and policy: "Following the science" is a bit rubbish, as well as mendacious, because the science only offers projections on likely outcomes if a particular path is followed. On economics he finds tougher ground: although some theorists have found the ensemble approach useful, it is not in vogue and hard to get such research published. The implication is of faddishness or denial in some academic circles. It's certainly true that Mandelbrot considered himself an irritant to the economic establishment.

The fundamental problem with models in various areas is that of agency, so that the predictions or projections of a particular model influence behaviour, providing feedback into the model - it's exactly this non-linearity that gives rise to chaos. Chaos, in the sense that our mathematical frameworks aren't very good at handling this. The three-body problem is an early example - chaotic and ultimately unpredictable motion, yet somehow nature does its sums and finds a path. In the third section of the book, which Palmer marks as "more speculative", he investigates quantum uncertainty and free will. There are some interesting ideas about chaotic attractors and fractals, which earlier parts of the book have explained well. The Cantor set somehow fills a space, yet it is empty (insofar as picking a random point in that space almost certainly does not lie in the set). Synthesising these ideas as an explanation of quantum uncertainty, giving rise to probabilistic observations, is clever, as is the idea of quantum noise as a source of inspiration and free will. We are in the same zone as Hofstadter's strange loops. Some of the most speculative ideas in the final chapter seem off, but credit for trying.

Yesterday we headed off to Dulwich Picture Gallery for the Tirzah Garwood exhibition. As usual, there's quite a lot packed into a relatively small space. As well as works by Garwood, there were a few by her more famous husband Eric Ravilious, and portraits of both by other artists. I think I perhaps found Ravilious more consistently to my taste, but Garwood offers more variety. The works on display included woodcuts, pencil drawings, oil paintings, marbled papers, and collages, often of children's toys or houses and shops - including one with a Meccano mechanism apparently intended to circulate ducks on a stream. The subject matter varied from drawings of her children to almost surrealist renditions with curious relative sizing and perspectives, almost reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland or James and the Giant Peach.

The Vicarage, by Eric Ravilious

Portraits of Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood, by Phyllis Dodd

Etna, by Tirzah Garwood

Brick House Kitchen, by Tirzah Garwood

A Crane Fly and Spider, by Tirzah Garwood

Erskine returning at dawn, by Tirzah Garwood

Book Review: Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
This has been a popular book for several years, and I received a copy at Christmas. The first few chapters reminded me a bit of The Ascent of Man, with a little (probably improved) of The Selfish Gene thrown in for good measure. Epic in scope, the author shows us that, since the beginning of our species, we have been destructive; although he notes it as depressing, it is in some ways reassuring, that it is not a particularly new trait. What is new is that we're at least somewhat aware of, and concerned about, the extent of our own destructive powers.

So we begin with other Homo species, some of whom went extinct long before us, and others with which we coexisted for a while. It may be of some disappointment, particularly to those intent on a paleo diet, to discover that our ancestors were much more gatherers than hunters. The cognitive revolution allowed us to imagine things, and since then, almost everything has been to a greater or lesser extent imaginary. We thought the agricultural revolution would make us happier, but it tied us to the land and made even more work for ourselves.

It's not all ultra-nostalgia. Although the book does imply why we so often hark for a simpler era, it also highlights what may loosely be called progress. Lifting the lid on various religions is quite interesting. Later sections deal with commerce and the scientific revolution. There are some choppy waters on fact-checking: I had to look up St Brigid, and I have doubts she would come top in a vox pop to name an Irish saint. The author seems to reckon hydroelectric power is a source all of its own, independent of the sun. (But how did the water get there? From the weather, driven by the sun. It's the same energy source, with a rather longer process, for fossil fuels. The only ultimately non-solar energy source on the planet is from naturally occurring radioisotopes.) On the whole, though, the writing is thought-provoking and entertaining enough.

Written in 2011 with the English language translation dating from 2014, the book is weakest on its optimistic futurology. The sense of progress in the book is inevitable; it hasn't feel that way for some time now. The author focused on the potentials of genetics and cybernetics, but missed out on AI. The difficulty with the future is that it's hard to predict.

Book Review: The Noh Mask Murder, by Akimitsu Takagi
A surprise Christmas present, this comes from the same publisher as The Honjin Murders and others, but it's a different author, translator, and detective. Nonetheless, the writing shares some elements of style and there are commonalities in the period (just post-war Japan) and the self-referential framing to Western "Golden Age" crime fiction (this time perhaps more Agatha Christie than Arthur Conan Doyle).

The storytelling mostly takes the form of a journal, written by Koich Yanagi, a chemist staying and working in the Chizui family mansion, whose friend, Akimitsu Takagi, happens to be staying locally and is called upon as a private detective by the present head of the family in fear of his life. The Noh Mask of the title is a family heirloom, but supposedly cursed.

As the bodies pile up, Takagi, Yanagi, prosecutor Hiroyuki Ishikari, and the local police proceed with their investigations, among a family overflowing with motives and issues. Although there are strong suggestions as to the identity of the killer, there's no clear evidence, and the novel uses the persona of Ishikari to probe this quandarous stalemate. The conclusions require some suspension of belief, but it's a neat and cumulatively original ending, and overall it's quite a page-turner.