Learned Counsel turned up the other day with the chassis of a racing car on a trailer.

I've been invited to help design the body - that's nice - and I was just getting the pencils out when the call came for me to leave for Nordenham in Northern Germany. NSW have a very big cable-making factory on the banks of the river Weser and needed a kilometre of cable magnetised. Fortunately for us, all the hotels in Nordenham were booked up so I and my fellow magneteer had to stay in Bremerhaven on the opposite bank, in a spanking new hotel - beastly luck, what?

There's a lot of building work going on in Bremerhaven; new marina's, hotels and so forth and I gather that the town is gearing up for the tourist industry and hoping to persuade the smaller cruise ships to visit.

There's a lot going for Bremerhaven and I would have liked a bit of time to explore the Maritime Museum which looked incredibly well stocked. The dock had a variety of vessels of all ages; tug-boats, sailing ships, a submarine and this interesting hydrofoil...

Even the shopping centre was shaped like a boat...

The hotel 'Im-Jaich' was excellent and I was delighted to see that the bathroom designer had taken note of my comments regarding shelves above basins...

... the perfect set-up but - there's always something that's not quite right. The water was luke-warm and no amount of running it produced the slightest increase in temperature. I had a particularly brief shower in the morning but noticed a control knob set into the wall under the sink. That evening I turned it to full and voilá - or rather, hier, hot water.

The dining room hinted at Hopper's 'Laundromat' and the painting in the foyer was one which I would have quite happily hung in my house.

Someone on the interior design team had done their homework and it showed. It was the briefest of visits and I was looking forward to a couple of days R&R when I got home but the Silk Finishing Machine was needing further attention so I had to wait for the weekend before having a bit of time off.

A Special Builder's Breakfast Club run with the Ambassador's Daughter was planned but we got only 20 miles before the Hillman faded on a roundabout and, not wishing to tempt fate, I turned around and headed for home. We stopped at the West Suffolk Motor Club's trial and watched a lot of people having fun in the mud before going home - it did look fun but something the Hillman is entirely unsuited to - too long and no turning circle to speak of. Later, I remembered that I'd removed the manifold to put the new copper gaskets on and hadn't re-set the idle so we could have got to Southwold but, having never been to a trials before, it was a happy omission.

I saw that Learned Counsel had been at work while I was in Germany; I'm sure everything's under control.