On Thursday night I saw a digital video that Peter Chatterton had put together � it was shown at the House of Commons for a reception Tricia Sibbons was organising. I hadn�t really wanted to go but I�d let myself be persuaded. The video used various bits of South African material Peter had accumulated and it certainly did the job. I would like to know a lot more about the software that he used to put it together. Peter said it was a bit like Cubase.

Ciaran was there too � he presented a big cheque to Trisha Sibbons for the massive sum of money that he raised with his Race Against Time. He also introduced me to his brother who has just taken over as artistic director for an opera company in London. Maybe the ENO but I can�t be sure. It took me a while to understand exactly what a responsible job he had � an amazing family.

I had drove down to Maidenhead and caught a train into Paddington and on the train I read a piece by Phillip Roth where he remembered getting to know the painter Phillip Guston in upstate New York during the last phase of his artistic career. Guston had been one of the Absex but from the late 60s he painted a strange and disturbing set of semi realistic and clearly autobiographical paintings. I had seen an exhibition of these works in Whitechapel around 1980 and I had completely failed to find a framework to put them into. Roth explains that these works are about late middle age and alienation from one�s earlier artistic career and identity.

By chance I had decided that I ought to try again with David Hopkins� �After Modern Art� and I looked at the final chapter only to see that one of Guston�s late works is in there � a couple of pages after a Cindy Sherman imaginary film still. Hopkins explains that Guston heralded a widespread return to painting in the 1980s � the so called �New Image� phenomenon. This was something that I had been aware of � I managed to see quite an influential exhibition at the RA around that time called �A New Spirit in Painting.�

Hopkins suggests that Guston was reacting against what he regarded as spurious notions of �purity� within the Absex genre. As he puts it �Guston spent the 1970s setting down the insistent graspable facts of his daily moods obsessions and insecurities. � One of his sources was the cartoons of Robert Crumb. Hopkins also makes a link across to Francis Bacon with Guston�s �recurrent images such as a head with a single wide open eye, wrist watches, bare light-bulbs, cigarette butts� speaking of �bouts of intense work worry and doubt.�

I was pretty impressed this way of looking at the work. There�s even a read across to Mike Kelley and his �bad boy� videos of about the same time which partly key off the more bizarre side of hippy cartoon culture � the Furry Freak Brothers for example. Hopkins also refers briefly and suggestively to Picasso�s late expressionist works

This month�s Mojo has a piece about Ian Macdonald under the headline �An Astonishing Mind� � quite a nice photo of him looking mischievous. The tribute by Tony Tyler is realistic but very warm.

Friday I went down to Portsmouth for a launch � not of a boat although it was at a boat-builders � but of a business programme. Dan Jones, co-author of The Machine That Changed The World was there. I said hullo. I hadn�t seen him since we met at The Royal Academy both taking the opportunity to take our daughters round the Summer Exhibition. I thought Dan�s lecture was spot-on.

Coming home I drove back up the Meon Valley and past the village where Jane Austen lived when she at last began to be famous a few years before her death. I used to be rather fixated on this landscape. Perhaps I should rekindle my interest.

I started to find out more about the development of Cage�s thinking about composition in the 1940s � pretty heavy going although I was surprised how dominant Indian ideas about the nature of emotion were. Just not the thought of thing that I ever thought would influence his thinking � at first sight much too conventional.