A beautiful day for a drive. I went to Swindon by a standard route - lots in common with the way I get to Birmingham but I stayed on the M4 and went over the chalk scarp down to Swindon. The landscape there is wonderful - at the Ridgeway. There is the Uffington White Horse, Dragon Hill beneath and a large Celtic fort on the skyline plus a little way along the Neolithic long barrow called Waylands' Smithy.

I enjoyed the meeting at the Research Council with three people who fund research on manufacturing and transport systems. One of the problems is that the operational side of transport isnt actually taught at undergraduate level at most UK universities - well what a surprise! I think the alliance with these guys which is already in good shape will go a lot further.

The meeting was over by 1.30pm and so I had the afternoon to myself. I drove South from Swindon (I had come in from the East on the motorway) and went up into the chalk countryside along the course of a Roman road which goes pretty much straight from Swindon to Marlborough where I stopped for a stroll round. Marlborough is on the River Kennet which flows East into the Thames. It was looking like an ideal Drakean location I must say - too good to be true. I found an independent record store and bought the new Cassandra Wilson and Lauryn Hill CDs.

I kept going South on a road which eventually would go to Salisbury down the Avon valley quite close to Stonehenge. But I branched off to the left on a B road with the aim of getting to Andover.

The next valley after the Kennet carries the Kennet and Avon canal which was the way of getting from London to Bristol or Bath on water. By this stage the canal must be targetting the Avon. I have yet to do have a canal holiday or a canal walk but that one looked pretty attractive today.

On the B roads I found the kind of country I had been looking for - I suppose you could say it was the Hampshire/Wiltshire Border. If you look on a map it is the block of "not much" to the East of Salisbury Plain. No towns and hardly a village, a lonely road up high on the chalk - maybe 7 or 800 feet and brilliant views in almost every direction, to the West out over Salisbury Plain and a fleet of helicopters exercising, to the East towards the Berkshire Downs and Watership Down, to the South towards the highland on the route from Winchester to Salisbury and to the North West to the strange shapes of the Malborough Downs.

A few years ago one Easter Yvonne and I did the walk from Salisbury to Winchester - its 22 miles and so we took a B&B half way through. A train from Guildford to Salisbury on Maunday Thursday evening meant we got into the watch in the Cathedral about 11.00pm. We walked the main distances on Good Friday and Easter Sunday and arrived in Winchester around 4 in the afternoon. One of those walks that you dont want to end.

I then had a spell of extending each end of that walk to see what kind of shape could be made. Rob and I walked for three days from Haslemere (10 miles south of here) via Arlesford to Winchester. Then a whole group of us walked over two days from Arlesford onto the South Downs and Petersfield; another time James and I walked from Petersfield along the South Downs Way to the River Arun which is the most easterly point in the chain to date. Finally another biggish group went from Salisbury, West for a day and then North(ish) along the old Saxon road from Southampton to Wales ending near Warminster. My aims was to extend this into a Coast to Coast route but that has drifted rather. On those various treks there were moments when you were high on the chalk and could see a long way in many directions where you had a great sense of peaceful isolation which is surprising given how crowded the South of England can seem to be. The chalk isnt that wooded and has a variety of sensous landforms which you can generally see pretty clearly.

But today convinced me that this crowding is an illusion brought on by the routes that we chose to travel the terrain. From Reading to for a 100 miles to the West down to the English Channel it is all chalk landscape and a great deal of it isnt very densely populated.

Eventually I got the main route from London to the South West - the A 303 which everyone has childhood holiday memories of eg parents arguing about how to brew tea in a layby. I used that road to go East (homewards) for about half an hour but then I deliberately went South from Basingstoke - which is a national bi-word for revolting new town architecture towards Alton (which is near where Jane Austen lived for a while).

Again it was clear that in the triangular space between Farnham, B-stoke and Alton is another swathe of relatively underinhabited chalkland - with high points towards seven hundred feet and lots of good landscape features and views. You can walk from Guildford to Farnham along the Pilgrims Way (which is fine but is quite crowded especially at weekends). But if you planned it properly you could keep walking for about a week mostly on quite lonely high chalkland and maybe end up in Marlborough or Swindon having experienced the South East from an utterly different perspective. And taken in all kinds of unusual old remains, isolated churches etc that you normally whiz past on a narrow crowded corridor. This line of thought must be connected to my reading of a Richard Long catalogue last night.

The Lauryn Hill double CD is a live performance - intense and personal - mostly solo acoustic or one or two musicians. The Cassandra Wilson opens with a version of The Weight that had me singing in the car. Its like a Southern blues inflected version of the beautiful Begel Gilberto album from a couple of summers back. Several quite adventurous "interpretations " of standards - and of course the Jobim masterpiece The Waters of March. Not fair to pass judgement on a first hearing.

Various pieces in a "how far am I gonna take this one" state.

The whole story of Mark's late 1970s cyber-improv experiment is great. I listened through once to the piece - which came across fine - given its birth it needs a much closer listen..

I think compared with Robin and Graham I was pretty late into this area. In my teens I had been interested in the core theory of computers and spent lots of time trying to design one which worked with large scale processes rather than electricity but I never built anything. In 1979 I decided I had to learn how to program and I got a Texas calculator. When the ZX 81 came out I got really enthusiastic and managed to get a few sounds one of the ports out with some machine code I got in a magazine but I didnt take the step up to computer synthesis proper until the late 80s and the Amiga - where my first foray was in BASIC. It gradually dawned on me that other people would create much more powerful software than I would ever.

Like Graham and his friend I wondered what would happen if you started let some controlled randomness into systems. At the time I was into Monte Carlo simulations and I thought that with the right probability distributions you could get somewhere. Nowadays I seem to use the machines as a constant and to rely on myself for the randomness.

The arpeggiator does sound great on that track and to my ears the acoustic guitar gives it a kind of intimate period feel - it brings Tubular Bells to mind. It took me a long while to realise that track was a kind of pop minimalism.

I took a wrong turn transferring a Cubase file from the other PC and didnt get as far as I wanted. I have a slight sensation of the technology getting the upper hand.