Foo Fighters were on Jules Holland�s show tonight and jolly good they sounded too. Dave Grohl seemed a decent chap in the interview with his musical host.

Driving back to Gfd tonight I caught M A Turnage talking about the new Joni Mitchell double CD very positively. He said that after Miles Davis died he saw Miss M as being the only artist of equivalent stature � that�s quite a thing to say � it made me draw breath � its not that I think of myself as one of her detractors at all but even so. I can see with that kind of gauntlet thrown down I will have to see for myself � apparently both Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter are on the album along with that enormous orchestra.

I listened to Plundafonix through just once today � and thought how light and clear all the music sounds � in some places the whitenesses are Chinese perhaps. Although the CD is varied in terms of genre I heard a kind of tonal consistency which I hadn�t been aware of before � that can either be a coincidence or I must somehow of picked the tracks with some sort of covert agenda. It particularly came up as different from the atmosphere on Shortstories � which had seemed related to the Charles Ives music I was listening to yesterday � a connection which I wasn�t expecting either.

When I got home there was another CD from Gilbert. I started in on the first track which is a powerful and compelling Spanish guitar line to match a contrapuntal trio drawn from BBC500. It seems that the only one to take these things is one at a time. Start with the first track and push that through to a point which feels stable at least for a while. Then look at the next track and work on that. It doesn�t seem to be a good idea to listen to all the pieces at a run and then try to pick one � too overwhelming � one has to build up a specific mindset suited to the piece at hand.

Today was spent in a Novotel Hotel near Junction 3 of the M6 outside Coventry � with the majority of the engineers looking at various systems and methods. There was an exercise in Measurement Systems Analysis intrigued me � it was to examine the different kinds of variation � from different individuals doing the measuring, from the measuring apparatus itself to see how much of the permitted tolerance was used up � and whether the measuring system was appropriate to the task. I have always found something slightly uncanny in statistics and this was a good example of that feeling. How it is possible to find so much structure in chaos.