Another day from Michael Parkinson's Daily Telegraph article about his week in South Africa filming for Sports Relief.. It gives a very good sense of the inner strength of people like Grace Sibeko who I have been fortunate to entertain in my home and who is daily right in the front addressing HIV and AIDS in a poor community.

"Thursday: how do you interview a woman who has a few weeks to live?

We film outside the hut where the women have their headquarters. It has been a long time since I walked and talked to a film camera. Long enough to forget how difficult it is. I used to do it for a living. Now, trying in vain to make it seem natural, I am reminded of why I gave it up.

We send the bodyguard off for food. He comes back with chicken and chips, which we eat in the women's hut. I am not hungry and push my food away, half eaten. I suddenly realise what I have done and look guiltily at Grace. She picks it up and takes it into the back room where the children have gathered, certain of rich pickings. They are as aware of our wasteful ways as we are insensitive to their abject poverty.

We save the most harrowing filming to the last. Maria is a 26 year old mother of two small children who is dying of Aids. We have met one of her children, the four year old, at the school run by Grace.

We film the child being picked up from school by Lorraine, another of the helpers. She has been looking after Maria for 10 months. Before that, she cared for Maria's mother who is dying in a hospice. Like all the women involved in the scheme Lorraine deals with death and grief on a daily basis. It takes an awful toll. You can see it on her face.

Maria lies huddled under a blanket, curled into the foetal position, head against the concrete wall. Lorraine introduces me; Grace sits in a corner of the room behind the camera. How do you interview a woman who has a few weeks to live? I ask her about the drugs I see on the bedside table. Lorraine says Maria has pulmonary TB and the drugs help - but she doesn't take them because she has to take them with food and she gives the food to her children.

Maria looks at me with black, deep eyes, waiting for the next question. I don't have one. I can't imagine any follow up to her answer. Grace says from behind the camera "Ask her what her children will do when she dies". I do as I'm told. Maria shakes her head in mute despair. I find myself apologising. I can't handle it.

Outside, Grace says "You were too emotional in there". And you weren't? Not so I couldn't be of any help. Then I see clearly her sense of purpose, the strength and detachment required to be compassionate without ever being overcome with pity."

I imagine we can all sympathise with Parky's situation as he describes it here. In a way it stands for the way that many global problem mostly take us. If we think about them then we are overwhelmed by a feeling of sad helplessness and so we prefer not to feel like this (because we can't do anything with the feeling) and not to think about them.

I met Gavin Gribbon on the train to work - he used to be in my security team but these days he looks much more corporate. I left the Civil Service College at the end of 1994 - where I started gigging a bit again especially with the extraordinary Streatham blues legend, Simon Prager, and mistakenly went back to DTI - my home Department where they gave me a rubbish job that involved a lot of being nasty to people. After a bit Gavin and I realised that we shared an interest in 60s music - although he is at leasy twenty years younger than me. One day I mentioned just in passing about the ND radio session - his jaw dropped. Up to that point I hadn't realised that this was an episode that might be of wider interest. He showed me Patrick�s MOJO article and so I dropped him a line

Today Gavin was talking about the new bands that he is listening to - he thinks there is more grunge around now than there has been for a while - a good thing in his view, keeping the spirit of MC5 alive. He mentioned the Vines for example.

Early tomorrow morning Yvonne, Vita, Emma, one of her school friends and I are driving to Penzance to park our car in a garage and get on a boat to the Scilly Isles. I don't know whether they will have a cyber cafe there or whether I wont be able to post to the diary.

The weather in London has got to a point where transport chaos is inevitable. Transport in the Scillies is boat, feet and sometimes bike.

I was going to get something substantial to read but instead I got an Oxford introduction to Theology � one of a series of short introductions that they are developing. I have also read the one about Music which I thought was pretty good. This one has a threefold characterization of postmodernism. Pomo is about skepticism in respect of integrating ideas � three broad areas � knowledge and reason, the self, the grand narratives . The grand narratives are things like Marxism, Christianity, Economism, Scientism, Progressivism � thinks which put time into a beginning-middle-end framework and thereby provide a sense of the present.

OK so far, but there's an extra couple of bits in Ch1. The first is that the embeddeness of religion in culture should not be under-estimated which is part of the reason for example why religion is part of so many conflicts. the second is that religion has been overwhelmed by the 20th century but paradoxically the subject matter of religion is often about the first person experience of being overwhelmed. Nice Hegelian touch there.