Leantown Saturday � a new experience � so many great offers to resist within a block or two. I dropped in on the second hand bookshop and got an interesting discussion of cultural theory for �3. I also succumbed to a Domesday Book for �5 � a copy, not the original � just Warwickshire, not the whole country � I already have Surrey. I bought a two and half inch map of how things are now to go with it. There were also two flutes to be tried and a Korg all of which I managed to resist. I bought an optical lead so that its easy to take a digital recording offair into the MD. I was amazed at how cheap MP3, CD, DVD players are.

First point � you can see where the Forest of Arden was because of the lack of settlement. Very dense settlement in the valley of the Avon and its tributaries. Very little on the high plateau between there and the Cole river � and indeed further North. Hampton in Arden is one of the few parishes in that area � and it boasts two slaves � one man and one woman!! Is slavery pre-Feudal � is that why it persists in the forest?

Hampton is in the Hundred of Coleshill. Hundreds are saxon administrative areas . Most of South London is in the Hundred of Brixton. Hundred boundaries interesting things � several Hundreds meet at the high point where Crystal Palace was sighted for example. So Coleshill being a hundred strengthens its putative connection with Old King Cole.

The irony is that high plateau is made of Carboniferous mudstone � an old rock surfacing through younger layers. Kenilworth, Coventry and Coleshill are around the edge of the Forest which seems to have continued in an aboriginal state. Anyway some geological sources talk of the Carboniferous layers in Arden containing coal � so there may be some coal in Colehill and -as in Surrey/Sussex there- may well have been charcoal burning and ironworking in the forest - with its own imagery, craft, myth and metaphysics.

(You can actually find bits of similarly aboriginal forest in South London still if you know where to look. Norwood (painted by Pisarro) is the North Wood � north of Croydon � a Hundred which belonged to the Archishop of Canterbury � who founded the school which Paul went to in Croydon. The next school north � the other side of Norwood - in Brixton Hundred was at Dulwich and that was the one which Nick Totton and Imac went to (or so Paul tells me). Dulwich was started by an actor who saw a ghost � around the start of the 17C - just after the Croydon school, I think).

So now I can claim hindsight � I knew there was something odd about the Blythe river. Basically its untamed and unmanaged � something you see in the Highlands or Wales but which you don�t see in the South. For example the River Wey has been a navigation since the Civil War and I am sure was navigated before that. It is said that Queen Elizabeth visited Brixton by travelling up the Effra. The Wey was obviously a communication channel and you can see all the Norman churches on its banks around Guildford. The Blythe is not like that

The important institution on its bank is a one �off the Knight Templars centre. The churches on the Blythe are on hills � like Hampton in Arden and Coleshill � and to my untutored eye, the sites have got �celtic� written all over them. This would be the basis of an argument which says that the fairy world of Shake�s comedies is the echo of a celtic mythology that lingered in the Forest of Arden.

You get fainter echoes in the south � Martha�s hill is named after a Saint who slew a dragon (in Aix I think). Similarly St Leonard�s Forest near Gatwick has dragon associations.

Also the supposed centre of England � the umbilical at Meriden � just over the river from Hampton. I have visited the centre of Germany equivalent in a round tower � a massive fortress which have called Himmler�s Camelot. Obviously there are boundaries that one needs to be aware of. As I have said I wouldn�t trust the Rollright Stones as far as I could throw one. There seem to be some links between this and elements of postpunk performance extremism.

After a geomantic foray: the Templars place is quite something. It currently exists as a 17C block � a bit like a Cambridge College, a tall church which has been reworked by GG Scott and an attractive Carolean �big house�. The College is a charitable foundation � an attempt to set things back to normal after the Restoration. The �back to normal� will embrace the kinds of foundations mentioned earlier in Croydon and Dulwich � there is also one in Gfd opposite the church which looks just like parts of St Johns Cambridge. But I also wonder whether the �back� also embraces a return to older ideas that the Puritans were especially hostile to. I have in mind the restoration of the Tothill Fields maze in the 1670s.

I couldn�t find the cross at Meriden but I decided that I could easily look for it at lunchtimes � it is about 10 mins drive from the office.

Meriden is obviously a cross roads � so you might expect a cross. One of the roads runs NE/SW to Hampton in Arden � in the other direction it clims a long ridge which runs N-S. In Meriden itself the church is outside the village � up on the ridge in a cluster with a lot of interesting buildings including a large half timbered house and a large Georgian manor. A classic defensive settlement.

The ridge stretches in crude terms from Coventry north up to Nuneaton. It is appreciably higher than the surrounding country and is a kind of outlier of the Penines.

You might think of the end of the Pennines as being the Derbyshire limestone country � which is an amazingly distinctive landscape. Rivers run south through this and come together in the Trent which loops back and drains into the Humber. The Blythe and the Cole are tributaries of this system and my guess is that the Blythe is the most southerly drainage in this system.

The limestone in Derbyshire is Carboniferous and this accounts partly for the weird landforms. The ridge that runs from Coventry to Nuneaton is volcanic and older than that. This is really very old in geological terms. My suspicion is that it is as old as the volcanic transformations that you see in the cliffs in North Cornwall � say at Hartland Point or indeed the dark rocks that the Colorado is now working its way through in the Grand Canyon. There is another ancient eruption in this area � to the north in Sherwood Forest which is geologically of a piece with Arden Forest. The M1 climbs over some even older rocks in Charnwood Forest as it goes through Nottinghamshire. My guess is that the Coventry-Nuneaton ridge is linked to the Charnwood Hills which are (I think) older than life itself.

But � the point is � that it�s the views from the Coventry end of the ridge that might lead you to think that the centre of England was somewhere nearby. As far as I can work out you can see across to Birmingham and the hills on the other side of the Severn Valley but you can also see the Cotswolds scarp stretching away on this side of the Valley. This is the view South West � but South East you can see across the ridges � basically to much younger rocks. My suspicion would be that on a good day you can see a chalk ridge � maybe at Dunstable. So this extensive panorama would be the thing that generated the belief that somewhere hereabouts must lie the centre of England.

Anyway I had better do some more research before I mislead people further.

I listened to the next 3 tracks on Travelogue from the point of view of working out what the orchestra�s function was. The key point is that JM is working with lyric material that is virtually bottomless � St Paul on �love� � the �through the glass darkly� bit � and W B Yeats � the �slouching towards Bethlehem bit�. Later on she has a crack at Job and his comforters � and in the middle of that lot she does Woodstock with the �billion year old carbon�. On some of these tracks she has Wayne Shorter doing the response as well. A lot of people will think that this is pretentious or unintelligible or in some other way a waste of time.

Sitting here, having had the temerity to take on Byron, Shakespeare, T S Eliot , S Plath and a Psalm on my first release � is that going to be my stance? Especially given the kind of things I write about Wayne Shorter, Andy Shepherd and John Martyn etc etc.

Obviously I think this is the big game � the one to chose if you can get through the door.

You are either listening to the words, or her voice if you like it (which I do) or to WS � for all the obvious reasons. You might be able to give about 15% of your attention to the orchestration- and on that basis its just fine. Proving that the orchestrator had got Job wrong � that what it really means in X and therefore on the basis of metaphor or metonym � say the horn voicings are all wrong � well is that likely or that WS should have had a more Lutheran view of �sin� when he pulled that phrase out of the air? I am still at the level of thinking I need to more work on Job! The words sound to me like they were written last week. I have booked myself in for next July to do one of my �things� on Turn Turn Turn.

I begin to get a purchase on it all when I listen to Woodstock � we have heard her do this in different ways � and this time its as if it is a Vaughan Williams song. In simple terms the percussion says � remember they are walking along the road� and the ethos says �think of billion year old carbon in terms of Antartica�. And of course � one can � one does � and it opens up new levels of appreciation. Another response might be � I don�t think this material can bear the weight of these associations. I have to say that mine is that the original interpretation under played the power of the material.

On yes � I woke up this morning and did a first draft of Paul�s lullabye.