Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-06-26 - 5:29 a.m.

I started an entry last night but then I miskeyed and lost it so I gave up and went to sleep. I have just been woken by a dream - a helicopter crashes near me into a crowded building but the rotor blades keep going with gory results. In fact this week I bought a copy of Philosophy Now which has a review of a book about dreaming. The issue is whether it is reasonable to posit that dreams have meaning. Quite famously, for example, Aristotle didnt.

Summising that a field of phenomena does or doesnt have meaning is a big step. I studied what this amounted to in the origins of science quite a bit in my 20s. A very good book on this topic was written by Burt - cant remember his first name - in the 1920s - the Metaphysical Origins of Modern Science. Rom Harre at Linacre Oxford and Gerd Buchdahl at Cambridge continued this kinds of exploration in the 60s and 70s. I was offered a B Phil place at Linacre but couldnt raise the money.

There's a lot "irrational" stuff in the history of science cited to explain how the faith in the mathematical explainability of the world got hold of people's minds. Rosicrucianism is one such and I was surprised when I came across this again in Prague in connection with Kominsky. Florentine Neo-Platonism is another cultural factor - something which is very clearly visible in Boticelli - compared with the more conventionally Christian artists that preceded him.

I was reading a lot of Buchdahl when I fell out with Richard Jones - a bass player - the only one in that era who came up to Cambridge actually having made a reasonably succesful album. We had a proposition and it got us in through one famous door - a very famous producer - in fact that was my only final year job interview. Richard had a Gibson EB3 which nobody plays much these days. Although I played quite a good vale Epiphone EB2 when I was scouting for a bass for Vita.

In the second year there was a band which I thought was rather hot. Richard played bass and Paul Bell played drums. Jon Cole sang and played his Gibson 335 through his Marshall 50 watt amp and cabinet. Steve Pheasant and I played saxes and flutes. It was a band where everyone wrote - in a demanding environment (Wheeler Drake Frith Totton Macdonald floating abouting not above making disparaging comments about songwriting which wasn't up to scratch.)(One could add Schama to the list but that would be showing off and probably less than 100% accurate.)

So it was bound to end in tears even though our finest hour was at the Edinburgh Fringe in the official Cambridge Student Dramatic package etc.That was the year Mark Wynne Davy was in it - he famously plays a two headed creature in a TV adaptation of Douglas Adams.

Anyway this is the week where I have tracked down the two missing members - Cole and Jones - the latter works in Greenwich and married someone from Principal Edwards Magic Theatre. One of the things that Jon Cole doesnt mention in his CV is that he was Musical Director for the Footlights Review (probably 1972) - the year Sarah Dunant was in it - also the person who ended up on TV as Arthur Dent and Sebastian's brother in Brideshead. SD is on Radio 3 tonite investigating the demise of dissent in the USA post WTC - not many larfs there I don't expect.

On this theme I note that Sara Davies is currently producing the Book at Bedtime on R4. I am pretty certain this is the same woman who went out with Ian Macdonald all those years ago. There were a clutch of four of them at Newnham - Jane, Sara, Sally and another Jane - three of them like Sarah Dunant studied English. Paul Bell fancied one of the Janes - the one I bumped into once in Charing Cross Rd just near the shop where (under the influence of R Jones) I bought my White Telecaster. I might have been a Ricky but wasn't.

Patricia Hewitt wasn't one of the four Newnhamites although I think she must have been skulking in the corridors somewhere - maybe we stumbled past her stoned. Probably a bit of a swot. Not a point to bring out in briefing her about Manufacturing Strategy either.

I was going to Birmingham yesterday but it was cancelled which meant I could put You Are Here and Fifths down on a CD. Jake and I lunched at the Watts Gallery which is on the Pilgrims Way between Guildford and Puttenham. Watts was a very succesful Victorian artist who we mostly remember these days for his portraits of Victorians - Tennyson, John Stuart Mill etc. But he painted all kinds of stuff and its interesting to see how he reacts to developments in art - he was active from Turner to Cezanne. I quite like his Symbolist phase - he has a Mausoleum completed by his wife which is one of the few genuinely Symbolist buildings in the UK. Someone called Blunt wrote the only book about Watts though I think this may be the Mr Mole's brother.

Jake and I skipped the Mausoleum and instead walked along the P-Way to the mysterious cross roads in the woods behind Loseley where the meeting pont has been eroded over the years so that it is about twelve feet lower than the surface of the surrounding land. By a coincidence I was reading a book about Celtic Christianity over lunch - sacred groves, wells dedicated to the three faced goddess etc.

Vita had an appointment in town so I drove her in and then browsed a music shop I don't visit often. The guy behind the till has a powder blue Fender Mustang - I think it is a 1964 and he got it in Oregon for �250. I chatted to him about whether such bargains are still possible - also about the price of Fender Champs and the fact I didnt buy one from him a year ago - 1974 vintage and absurdly under priced. I ended up buying a Seiko automatic tuner -something I have never owned before.

It reads out the deviation in cents. Imagine some number (N) multiplied by itself twelve hundred times gives the answer two. Suppose you are trying to play A at 440 Hz and you are three cents off. Then the N cubed muliplied by 440 gives you the frequency you are playing. A pure fifth deviates from a well tempered fifth by about two cents. The Cz101 is callibrated in another number - M - which multiplied by itself 720 times yields two - but thats close enough to get started.

Trying to keep the needle on target as you play a long note on the flute is a kind of bio-feedback system.

Not going to Birmingham meant I could go and here Brian and others present some research at St Mary's in the evening about attitudes amongst the 18-24 age group. A lot of people were there but none from that age group which is the issue, of course.

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