An e-mail from Gavin Gribbon ordering a copy of Plundafonix � good news.

When I got in last night there was a letter from Jean Burge at the URD Music Society which asked for any news of Lynn Coull. I printed out Lynn�s latest letter and scribbled a few sentences on it and then Jake and I got in the car and I drove up to the top of the hill and was about to post the thing through Gillian Lloyd�s door when she and her son Michael appeared. So we had a brief chat � she seems to have enjoyed Cleveland�s recital too. Then her parents drove up for a visit and so I scooted off with Jake for a walk on the south side of the hill � quite chilly and misty in the valleys but beautiful in its own way.

I picked up Vita from her dance class � she was pretty uncommunicative and then I walked into town. First stop Dixons where I bought a lot of media � music CDRs , PC CDRs and Minidiscs. I am still working out my preferred mastering paths.

I spoke to Sheila Leigh � Steve Pheasant�s partner when he was alive. Steve�s mum has gone into an old people�s home and she is organising some of his possessions. She has created a Steve Pheasant Library at British Society of Osteopaths � and she wanted to know if I wanted Steve;s collection of flute music. I most certainly do. I mentioned to her about the ergonomics work we are doing with Industry Forum and she liked the sound of that. I also asked if she had seen Nick Sinclair Brown � piano player in the SP 5tet and international lawyer in the Cambridge History Dept. She said that he was out and about. This is great news as I very much want to work on Standards with him � we talked about it in the Summer.

One of my teachers is in the papers today � Bernard Williams who has apparently turned into Britain�s greatest philosopher. He had rooms in Kings and on Mondays about tea time he held a philosophical discussion which any students could attend. The rooms had been decorated by some Bloomsbury artist. Anyway this is all strong stuff for a young mind who has just bumped into Pheasant, Frith and Drake.

His new book seems to be about contradictions in contemporary attitudes to truth. From the excerpts he sounds as if he is working on some issues to do with social affiliation. That in as much as we are able to chose our contacts we find it better to select those whom we believe espouse true beliefs on good grounds. I�ll have to mention this to Laurence Cranmer � I think we are about to have a binge on accepting another person�s reasons for acting. In otherwords a good leader is one whom we believe gives us good reasons for (our own) acting and in this respect truth-telling might be a virtue which is both good in its own right but also effective. Like Iris Murdoch, who I think is not that much older, Williams comes out classical philosophy, through linguistic philosophy to broader contemporary moral philosophy. It would be a nice question how we judge someone whose motivation to tell the truth is not love of truth as an abstract virtue but a desire to influence other ie where truth is intrumental to power disguised as legitimate authority. In what circumstances might these priorities be revealed?

The article quotes Richard Rorty saying that Williams is the heir to Isaiah Berlin which should be really up Laurence�s street � I expect he is probably on the ball already. Williams� late 80s/early 90s books sound worth a browse eg Shame and Necessity. Williams is interested in life as a process of self-discovery � what it might mean to discover that one�s identity is such that self-realisation compels a certain course of action � with less than perfect consequences. I suppose one can hear the echo of Sartre here � certainly Kierkegaard.

In his way he was a controversial figure when I was taught by him � at the time married to Shirley Williams and inclined to attempt to defend the Wilson Government which didn�t go down wonderfully well with a left leaning late 60s campus.

I have decided on an improvable path for Short Stories � writing the PC CDRs from the WAVs on the portable. This seems to work OK � I have written four this afternoon as the process is pretty rapid. They play OK on the pioneer. I think I will send these to a few people and get reactions.

The next step is to try the same path with the 6 selected tracks from Cleveland�s recital � I asked Gillian if she would listen to a demo and get some feedback.

I drop in at the remaindered bookshop opposite Dixon�s and picked up a collection of essay by A N Wison on religion in Victorian society. I liked Wilson�s contributions to the discussions of Victorian realism which Marvin Bragg chaired on R4 as I drove up to Manchester a fortnight ago � also I think he ambivalent attitude to religion will make it good fun. I also picked up a tome on �realism� in attitudes to Jesus of Nazareth � how a realist ideology has been used over the last 300 years to develop a whole series of (different) contemporary ideologies.

Finally there was what looks like a promising book on the history of fetishism of the cross. This has a brilliant chapter on Constantine�s mother � Helena � who has been ignored since Evelyn Waugh wrote about her in the early 1950s. Its around 320 or so � about the time when the Nicean creed is being formulated and Helena is in her 70s � nonetheless she decides to go to Jerusalem to look for authentic sites and relics. This is (of course) partly ideological � she is enmeshed in power politics and has already had Constantine�s wife, Fausta, killed in a strange episode which appears to be mixture of politics and Freudianism. Fausta had slept with Constantine�s son by another woman and as a result Constantine executes the son. This enrages Helena who (may have) made sure that Fausta drowned in her own bath. There is a theory that Helena�s journey to Jerusalem is a penance.

She tries to find the site of the crucifixion and concludes that it is on a hill where Hadrian had put up a temple of Venus after the second Jerusalem War (the Jewish temple is destroyed in the first Jerusalem War). Apparently she excavates and finds relics of crosses including the INRI �rationale� which Pilate had to offer for the execution. She recovers the nails used for the crucifixion and sends them to the Emperor Constantine who converts them into a horse�s bridle for use in battle. (Or so the earliest literary source says).

Constantine (it seems) invented the ancient equivalent of the Euro as part of his general state-building progress. On his way to the top he utilises the cross as a sign for his troops to put on their shields in his last great battle against his rival at Milvian Bridge. The precise reason for Constantine�s adoption of Christianity is hard to find and may ultimately have been a genuine personal commitment. Apparently it was Constantine who made Sunday a public holiday.

There is some interesting myth-making which attempts to link Helena (as daughter) with a British regional king who is commemorated as Old King Cole in the nursery rhyme � an idea which appealed to Henry VIII and was repeated by Milton.