What a hectic week � especially Wednesday night at the Accelerate dinner in the Birmingham ICC followed by the drive along Watling St to Cannock to get to the route-mapping seminar run by Cambridge-IFM and the Australian National University. Tuesday had been the all-day NEAC Conference with the European cluster managers. It all leaves me quite breathless especially after a very early start on Wednesday morning to hear the US election results � definitely not the way I usually spend my time.

The IFM-ANU exercise was the highpoint, despite the lavishness of the Accelerate event. I met a Chinese guy who had worked in commercial vehicle finance before doing this Cambridge masters and made some inroads on the philosophy of technology. Given that our task was to look 20 or 30 years ahead, I made the bold claim that by about 2025 Chinese vehicle volumes would have plateaued and the French would have found a way of leveraging their advantage in the philosophy of technology into new ways of selling mobility products and services.

The seminar also gave me a chance to recycle some ideas from the Norwich event � one of which seemed to go down well - the idea that vehicle design has to establish annual volumes to be produced and sold and that this is the foundation for choosing the body assembly technology and by implication the split between capital and revenue expenditure.

I spent some of the week cultivating someone from Slovenia � it seems this may be the first country that we target for our new pan-european model. He seems to get on well with the lady from Lower Saxonny � a region from the former GDR.

With all these ideas swilling around I have started out on my latest funded essay and reflection where I received the green light. I decided that the best way is to throw down a lot of thoughts � some original, some borrowed � and to let a shape emerge.

I am dipping around in Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus � clearly I have been reading his works in the wrong order � missing out the middle and going into the late constructions around Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone, The Basement Tapes etc whereas LT seems to be the big pitch even though its nearly 20 years old.

Emoticon by Ben and Jason has arrived � its only a CD-single/EP � it sounds very similar to their first CD which I bought after meeting them at the premier of A Skin Too Few. I think I will have to track down the album length CD.