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Delightful Saturday afternoon with Hania, Gaia, Paul and Jake at the Royal Albert Hall, seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark with a live orchestra. On the way there, I took Elaine around Imperial College, which she hadn’t been into before. Outside, the Imperial College Chamber Choir was doing a cappella pop songs, which was really quite extraordinarily good. All the while, a small girl keep popping out of the door at the top of the stairs into the Polish Club on  the other side of the road.

Then, on Sunday, across to Copenhagen with Richard and Sam for our 3-day session with the UN Global Compact, particularly Ole Lund Hansen, Ingvild Sørensen and Rosedel Davies-Adewebi. Great dinner on the Sunday evening with Ole and Ingvild, at Höst – with extraordinarily good Nordic cuisine.

On Monday evening, I took Susanne Stormer of Novo Nordisk to dinner at Uformel, which she suggested. Also great, as was the Vietnamese restaurant, LêLê, which we ate at on Tuesday evening.

The work went brilliantly well, with the team working very well together. Fascinating session with Erik Rasmussen of Monday Morning, during which I filmed an interview for our Breakthrough Innovation Program. Then I had to unhook first thing on Wednesday morning to fly to Stuttgart for Bosch.  Sadly, a trip that should have taken a few hours took over 8 when SAS cancelled my flight, with no explanation.

Great session with Bosch, where I spoke to a couple of hundred senior executives, including a couple of Board members – and then had a fascinating dinner with them afterwards.

Flew back to London the next morning, among other things for a session with Paul Bunje of the X Prize Foundation, which was immensely invigorating. Key input for our UN Global Compact work, with a scouting trip coming up to San Francisco and LA.

Great lunch, too, with Jamie Broderick, Howard Kemp and Giles Sibbald of UBS Wealth Management on Friday, which meant we were a little late back for a session with Cathy Runciman  and Lisa Goldapple of Atlas of the Future – but that went wonderfully well, too.

Then yesterday, Saturday, Elaine and I drove across to Little Rissington, to see Pat, Tim and Caroline. He is recovering from broken ribs again, after a fall. An interesting session with iPhones with Gray’s oldest son, variously known as Boo, Aston and Kipp. These phones can do so much wonderful work, with the quality of the video recording for our interviews quite extraordinary by historic standards.

Home lateish, where I watched the episode of The Night Manager I had missed when flying to Denmark last Sunday morning. Stunningly good.

Then this morning I awoke early, in the midst of a dream about interrupting a very senior person who was telling a group of us how to right the world. I banged my hand on the table and thanked him for his provocation, saying that I had cracked the problem. And then, when I woke up, it turned out that a sequence of ideas in my head were actually quite useful. I promptly hurried to capture them on my crack-faced BlackBerry.

Am in Stuttgart, where I did a fascinating session last night for Bosch. Came in, with a few hassles along the way caused by cancelled flight, from Copenhagen. And in that context this article in today’s International New York Times really rang true. A clever play on our heart-strings, perhaps, but a pretty powerful analysis of the realpolitik, too.

A catch-up blog, after a Red Queen month. Highlights of recent weeks include:

• a visit by former Santa Fe Institute president Geoffrey West to Volans on Monday 8th February, who now features in our first Exponentials interview;
• my chairing on the 9th of a Tesco hosted stakeholder session at London Zoo on the thorny subject of ‘sustainable tuna’ (blog to come), followed by a private view of the Science Museum’s new Leonardo exhibition on the same evening;
• my latest Imperial College lecture on the 17th; a wonderful evening with David Wheeler on the 19th, after which he sent me copies of John le Carré’s Absolute Friends (almost finished and hugely engaging) and the new biography of le Carré;
• took part in a panel session on the theme of ‘Will Tech Unicorns Save the Planet?’ at London’s Google Campus;
• talked to a seemingly endless stream of fascinating people coming through the office, including biomimicry’s Michael Pawlyn on the 22nd, Jeanne-Marie Gescher and Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase on 2nd March, David Grayson on 3rd March, and Thomas Ermacora on the 3rd;
• calls with people like Andrew Winston, Jessi Baker of Provenance, and Alex Steffen;
• and ‘Exponential’ working sessions with Lorraine Smith in NYC, David Bent of Forum for the Future and Simon Hampel of Leaders’ Quest.

Meanwhile the magnolia tree stays in bloom in Bloomsbury, the crocuses are up on the Common, the Egyptian geese on the Pond have produced a large clutch of goslings, the decluttering of 1 Cambridge Road proceeds apace, the EU debate gets into its idiotic stride, and the US elections continue to career towards a possible Trump:Clinton shoot-out.

Took the bike into Cloud 9 Cycles in Bloomsbury a couple of days ago. They warned me that the frame may be unsafe, though I responded that the dent in the cross-bar dates back 15 years to when a car hit me, while the slightly distorted front forks, I think, to the Russian collision 18 months ago, since when I haven’t cycled. Not sure which way this is all going to pan out.

Out of the blue today, I received an email from Turkey. It came from Murat Sayginer, an artist who in 2014, I learned, did a short film featuring Pisces volans, the flying fish – our totem at Volans.

The film, Volans, was a Vimeo Staff Pick. Spookily, it features many images that have been important to me over the decades, including skeletons, spirals, starfields, 2001-like tunnels, and my beloved flying fish. The style of imagery reminds me of LSD in 1969.

So I asked him how the film had done since it was released? He replied: “It screened at lots of festivals and received over 250.000 views. The community liked it a lot. The flying fish is like my alter-ego,” he explained, “and I got curious about the web domain and found you!”

Currently working as a freelance visual artist and filmmaker he has a project called Animals, consisting of 72 collages that he is selling as open edition prints. The Flying Fish print is the first of the two images above.

The short film Volans ends with one – and then a shoal – of flying fish heading in towards Planet Earth. Exactly the sort of imagery I would have liked to conjure when drawing in the 1970s.

Inspired me to go upstairs, and fish out one of the drawings I did in 1978, according to the dating. This one featured human and ostrich skeletons walking across the backs of a vanishing landscape of crocodiles, but doesn’t show what another in the series showed – a series of golden dolphins breaking through the tsunami front, like claws in a giant linear paw.

Weird what the human brain will conjure.

Very sorry to hear news of the death of ‘Winkle’ Brown, but his obituary in today’s Times makes utterly fascinating reading. Some of the statistics of his career can be found here, courtesy of the BBC. Tim this morning recalled Brown as a “hoot”.