At St Luke's on Victoria Road, we have tomorrow evening (http://gdvibrations.org/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&agid=6&jevtype=icaldb&year=2008&month=08&day=31&Itemid=43)

'STEPHEN TABERNER and BEATRICE the Double Bass in concert, supported by GRANDPA GEORGE AND HIS JUMPING FLEAS UKELELE BAND 8pm SUNDAY 31 AUGUST COST £8, £6 Stephen takes to the stage with his beloved double bass, Beatrice, to titillate your ears with a sly array of quirky, funky and melancholic songs exploring, amongst other things, teenage angst, the existential life of goldfish, and the secret life of peaches. Grandpa George will be singing a harmonious and light-hearted cocktail of carefully constructed ukelele -accompanied delicacies to delight the ears!'

It's just down the road from me and looks as if it might be fun; would anyone care to join me?

Well, I'm back. Ryanair flying from a small airport to a competent one works very efficiently; fifty minutes from wheels-on-ground with one set of passengers to wheels-in-air with another. And whilst it may only be relevant to people with my particular travel habits, Stansted counts as London Terminals, so you can leave by Eurostar and return from Stansted with the same tickets.

European rail ticketting is very unified, but if you've bought a ticket from Stockholm to Copenhagen while in Germany, you can only refund it in Germany, which is less than useful since at the point you want the refund you'll be in Denmark or Sweden.

This is getting to be a pattern - I spend the first day wandering around the city, and then get into proper museum visiting. Stockholm is an amazingly pretty town, built on a multitude of islands (had I a small boat, I could island-hop all the way east to Helsinki; getting the ferry on that route during daylight hours would be glorious) and filled with architectural unities since it's built with lots of space to grow and hasn't demolished one epoch's buildings to build the next. Sweden's having been vigorously neutral since well before the invention of aerial bombardment also helps.

So, I've taken a boat trip round the closest-in set of city islands, I've walked along the Art Nouveau quayside to the island of museums, I've been to the top of the Town Hall tower. The Town Hall does not sell gold-foil-covered chocolate replicas of the Nobel medal; I think they take that too seriously for confectionary.

Most of the afternoon today I've been at the Vasa museum. I'd known the story - flagship of the Swedish navy is built slightly too narrow for its height, sails out of harbour on its maiden voyage in 1628, tips over and sinks after twenty minutes. What I hadn't known was quite how garishly covered from bow to stern in carved statues it was - a full set of Roman emperors on both sides of the bowsprit - and what was only recently discovered was that the whole was painted in twenty-five colours including some really garish pinks, and gilded everywhere that gilding was reasonable and in most other places. There was a Board of Inquiry afterwards, which ended up saying that nobody was guilty; everyone knew that the boat was unstable but was unwilling to tell Gustavus Adolphus, fighting Poles in East Prussia, that he couldn't have the flagship he'd been demanding impatiently.

Not sure how well the photos will come out, it's black oak in a dimly-lit building and I'm using my portable camera, taking six photos at one-second exposures with image-stabilisation and picking the best. But the boat is really impressive, and the museum of boat-building, sailing and Swedish history around it is a really good way to lose an afternoon.

I had a really fantastic dinner - perfect roast lamb with interesting vegetables and exciting gravy - with livredor and hatam_soferet at the Fenix bar on Götgaten, followed by coffee and ice cream, and a walk in a sculpture park which demonstrated that, whilst sculptures may be more visible in daylight, you can make up better stories about them at night.

Not only do they have three kinds of hot pork product and five kinds of cold pork product here at the breakfast buffet, they also have pancakes. From the general shape of Danes, I can only assume they swim the Øresund twice daily.

The Handelskai region of Hamburg is another of those districts whose totem bird is the crane. The City clearly decided that it had slightly too many steamship docks and slightly too few expensive riverside apartments for contemporary economic conditions, and is acting to rectify this with up to sixteen cranes at a time. It also has a decent Museum of Seafaring, rather bigger and better than the similar one on the docks in Liverpool. And I saw a sailing ship (the Sea Cloud II) leave harbour, accompanied by the municipal mooring tug Mooring Tug II.

Dinner at a Persian restaurant called Teheran; pubs are not the first association I have with Teheran, so I assumed anywhere with so unprepossessing a name survived on its food. Fantastic buttery chicken and lamb kebabs. Then met up in Altona with a couple of people I'd met in the conference in Vienna last month - they have solved the crystal they've been stuck on for two years, thanks to chemistry rather than any particular contribution from the workshop, so we happily drank wine together.

I've just reached Copenhagen after spending the day in Lübeck. Hansestädter are almost too easily photogenic on clear days: blue sky, red brick, green copper roofs, water. Lübeck has particularly good spires, and a Great Gate the right side of which is leaning into the swamp in which it was built and containing a nicely Hanseatical exhibition (apparently Boston in Lincolnshire is England's main Hansestadt, where in the 1200s we swapped wool for salt cod).

I do not recommend anyone to drink bubble-tea in Germany until it's caught on a bit more. Eew, raw tapioca.

Ypres happened to a fortified Flemish market town right on the French border - a citadel set up by the Spanish against the French at the beginning of the 17th century, and whose fortifications were upgraded by the victor every time it changed sides. The place was clearly ludicrously rich in the thirteenth century, the Cloth Hall and attached cathedral (both rebuilt 1918-1965) are large by contemporary standards.

You get there in a train ride of an hour and a half through countryside all of which looks like the view from the train to Ely from Cambridge - prosperous farming land with a line of houses always visible - except for the occasional war graves.

The memorial to the dead soldiers of the First World War from Ypres would be slightly ostentatious except in a very posh English country churchyard - Belgium was neutral, and the civilians fled fairly early.

The memorial to the soldiers killed at Ypres is the Menin Gate (set into the medieval walls; I was rather expecting it to stand alone like Marble Arch or the Arc de Triomphe) at a completely different scale. Columns of names carved about an inch high cover the whole building - yes, including the outside, including the stairwells; fifty-four thousand names, about the same as the Vietnam memorial in DC, for just the unrecovered bodies from a single short front.

The First World War hasn't quite receded into history, but you can sense it heading there - the museum felt nearer to the museum at Culloden than it did to Auschwitz, 'war is hell' rather than 'the grandparents of some of those visiting were killed here' - though there were hundreds of people watching the Last Post on a random Tuesday evening in August.

They have a Museum of Musical Instruments, which fills four large floors with a vast collection of instruments ancient and modern - the giraffe and pyramid pianos, ancestors of the upright obtained by bending a long grand piano upwards behind the keyboard. The seven-headed trumpet, so that you could play Western music on valveless trumpets simply by picking the appropriate trumpet for each key. A collection of strange mutations of the violin, including one which is symmetrical at the bottom and lopsided at the top.

They have a Royal Palace, the tour of which proceeds through half a dozen rooms where there is nothing but white paint, cast trinkets thrice-gilded with fine gold, and crystal chandeliers, before suddenly turning into an exhibition of satellite photos and, in a room with the ceiling covered in the shells of 1.4 million Thai common iridescent green beetles, the hands-on section of a standard science museum.

They have the offices of the European Commission, which make Potsdamerplatz in Berlin look positively refined; huge building after huge building, with the local office of the Scientologists wedged in oddly opposite the department of agriculture. A fifteen-storey sign on the sign of the Barleymont welcomes Slovakia pre-emptively to the currency union, a hexadecalingual sign opposite welcomes France to the presidency of the EU.

There is a tasteful and subtle monument to Fifty Years Of Belgium, built in 1880 about the time that Franz Josef was laying out Vienna, and in similar style - sweeping wings up to a Brandenburg-Gate-style gate.

There is the Museum of Central Africa, which has a fantastic collection of African wildlife (stuffed), a couple of rooms of a didactic style no more used (whole cases of 'Common parasites of the elephant', 'Useful starch-bearing plants of the tropics' or 'Remarkable African spiders'), and some very poorly explained ethnology accompanied by apologetic notes; this is in an enormous palace, whose grounds are now used for bike-riding and carp-fishing.

Bruges tomorrow, I think.

I've recently been trying some woodwork. If I want a cube of wood 33 millimetres on a side, I buy a stick of wood hat has been planed down to 33 millimeters on a side with square corners, I set up a mitre saw, I make two pencil marks 33mm apart on the edge of the wood, put the wood on a flat table and extend the marks across the side of the wood using a square resting on the table. I make sure the blade is in the same position relative to the mark each time I cut. I clamp the bar of wood to the back of the saw housing in two places, and I cut twice. If I've been careful the cube is 33mm rather than 34mm.

I believe that a competent metalworker could make a metal cube 33.00 millimeters on a side, I've read about Fabry-Perot etalons which are essentially glass blocks with one dimension precisely 33.0000 millimeters. Where would I look for information at the boringly-detailed level of accuracy that I gave for woodwork of how these extra orders of accuracy are obtained?

I suppose I'm looking for information at a grade that would satisfy a six-year-old's sense of recursive questioning - yes, you measure it with a micrometer, but how did you make the micrometer and ensure it was accurate. I guess this is a one-term module taken in the first year of a mechanical engineering degree, but what's the best textbook for that course?

Vodafone publishes details of average revenue per user per month over its rather large user base across the world; converting everything into Euros, we have a measure of some product of wealth and loquaciousness.

The Irish are at the top, followed by the Dutch, Spanish, Maltese, Australian, Brits, Czechs, Greeks, New Zealanders, Portugese, Italians, Hungarians and Germans in that order. I've ignored Albania, Romania, Egypt, Turkey and India because they're clearly enough less wealthy than the EU core that the tariffs must be lower there.

Silent Germans and garrulous Irish are to be expected by the standard prejudices, but I'm surprised how talkative the Dutch are and how quiet the Italians.

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