Jake and I went out to the local hardware store to get some mousetraps � we opted for two approaches � the nice modern one where the mouse is trapped alive and the traditional one where it isn�t. Jake slept overnight in the room where the mouse evidence has appeared and the mice sensibly didn�t attempt further entry.

Joni Mitchell�s Travelogue has arrived � impossible not to be sucked in. I have listened to the first CD � several songs from my favourite period � around For the Roses through to Hejira. Eg Amelia, Ludwig�s Tune, For the Roses, Trouble Child. Alongside this are really serious �settings� W B Yeats, St Paul, Mingus and Job � some of which I am much less familiar with. Billy Preston plays B3, Wayne Shorter soprano, Kenny Wheeler flugel and then there are these enormous continental arrangements which make me think of John Adams, sometimes of the early 60s Jimmy Smith big band stuff like The Cat, sometimes Bernstein, sometime Nelson Riddle maybe even Gil Evans. It is a vast sound canvas/landscape that she places her lyric vision in � setting them off against some of the foremost improvisers on the planet. I suppose she�s saying something like � this is serious american music - and I find it profoundly affecting. What does it all mean � no idea yet but sure as sausage it means something � maybe on the agenda from Summer Lawns. I relish the thought of finding out � and there�s all that artwork too � I won�t even begin to summarise what she�s up to here.

Apparently it was done at AIR in North London. When I was working on the aesthetics of improv, Richard Jones arranged for us to go round the original location at Oxford Circus � with the boss.

Talking of eminent Canadians � Leonard Cohen has just been given a high honour � alongside the UN AIDS Envoy � see www.kwase-kwaza.com

James has started to link Baudrillard to his experience of the retail sector � that people decide to buy within a system of signs. Steve Pheasant and I were going to write a book about this in the early 1980s � Steve�s idea was that there was something called semiotic utility. My idea was you could find traces of it in Hobbes, Mandeville, Hume and Smith. It was going to be our alternative to playing bebop after he got ill.

James and I talked a bit about the invention of the department store � Manchester in the 1840s and then Paris and then NYC � and the place of Heals in the diffusion. There are times James frightens me � he was putting together his certificates for Hoggwarts and I realised that in English across six papers he missed only 3% of the total available marks � not that he wants to study this subject. On the one hand one can�t help taking some pride in this � on the other that has never really been the point.

The Refuge from the Roads and Hejira run back to back . (Hejira the album is one of the finest in the arcana � with Larry Carlton and Jaco Pastorius at the height of their game.) I had a Hejira dream once � I asked Miss M about �the slightest touch of a stranger�. She held her little finger up close to mine and a spark jumped the gap.

I wish she�d done Sweet Bird � her John Martyn moment � I have done one rough remix but I can�t get it out of my head. I must check whether that bit about who knows where the time goes is on the original Chinese Caf�. The Dawntreader comes up as bright as a new pin � Dave Crosby staking all his silver on a promise to be free. Or another reference has to be Joshua Rifkin�s arrangements for Judy Collins.

I have been working the U2 this week � running it through the Vamp into USB428 � some reverb and a fast digital delay � something Cozi Powell�s guitarist told me at my cousin�s wedding. Playing the middle position with both pick-ups and then mixing the concentric tone/volume controls. You can�t do this on a two pick up Fender and I have always found the four control Gibson layout unwieldy. Danelectro took some Gibson features � like the rosewood bridge and soundcells in a solid body � but drove them from single coils. The Regent guitar people suggest that running the two single coils together was like a humbucker configuration � well maybe. Anyway in the Vamp I have been using simulations of smaller pre 1970 valve amps � AC15 AC30 the Bluesbreakers Marshall combo � and I am finding that combination very engrossing. The sound will shift from a Hank Marvin sweetness through to a Lee Hooker growl � depending almost on how you hit the strings.

It seems that the Eggle guitars at Regents are private sales. That makes three guitars they have which are very very unusual and not all that expensive really � for what they are � but kind of beyond my budget for idle speculative purchase. The Nighthawk for example is Gibson moving in the Strat direction with a five position pick-up selector. Something they tried and now have abandoned. I really ought to buy a second flute first.

I am gradually rearranging the books � pulling out those volumes that seem relevant now � one such is Fordham�s introduction to Jung. Intuition orients us to future possibilities and along with extraversion it is one of the critical components of leadership. There is some stuff going on this topic (back at the ranch) which is not so well grounded. The thing about possibility � is how to handle its limitlessness. You might say that the first task is to get people to engage with possibility rather than actuality. But the next task is to shape or focus that engagement.

Trawling through the books I have come across the Emergence of Probability by Ian Hacking who taught me a bit although I am not sure what � maybe Leibniz. In Ch3 he has a brilliant sentence � probability began in 1660. He believes that for a hundred years after this there was a degree of confusion in the term. Probable was still used to mean worthy of approval as it had been since Roman times � a sense more to do with alternative actions that than alternative statements.

Paul Bell rang � about the possibility of meeting up with Richard Jones in the next two to three weeks.