Well I said this could be a Sunday to remember. This is twelve hours after the last posting.

I hadn't met Lynn before although in theory I am some kind of interface between Guildford and Highveld. It emerges that she comes from a teaching background especially in business management. In fact if you met her you could easily see her as a market researcher - say. Her presentation started from the broad demographics - if we don't do better about 0.75m adults a year extra will die in South Africa by the end of this decade. The number of child-only households in SA is already rising exponentially. These households face poverty - having paid for minimal medicines while the adults died and then for the funeral expenses.

At the end of the service Annie got up and said that if people wanted to do something now then they could always buy a CD almost all the money went to the frontline and (in her view) you got some interesting music in return - which even if you didnt like it you could give to someone younger. This did shake out a few �20 notes from some wallets which would hardly notice it.

Before the service I met Grace Sibeko who is travelling with Lynn and who is co-ordinator of a Government funded HIV project in a suburb of Johannesburg. The two of them had some boards with photos of the areas in which they work which took me right back to my last trip to SA - even with its priveliged tourist trajectory especially as we went up towards the Mozambique border. .

Lynn is making common cause on the ground with Grace's and similar projects in her area. Its not as if there are that many of them but there is a great value to be secured in the synergy in terms of extending the reach and credibility of her work. Amongst the most immediate issues are creating more bereavement counsellors - cos there are so many extra deaths - and getting better discussions between men and women on the whole HIV-AIDS issues. Lynn also said that you couldnt overestimate the importance of economic development either - a black teenager with vs without a job had a totally different attitude to safe sex.

To help get people focused I had put out various maps and brochures from SA from the trip. Grace said a fascinating thing over lunch - she hadnt realised that Europeans came to SA to go to places like Kruger Park - or that there was a good Museum on the recent history of SA on the edge of the Central Business District in Joburg. People in her community ought to understand these things she said. I wonder what she made of all of us - I had some Kwaito music on when they arrived. Oh she said can you play Kwaito?

As host I suffered the usual anxieties - would anyone turn up? would there be enough food? would people like the food? Would they enjoy themselves? Well the food seemed to be OK.

Amongst the guests - Robert the Rector, Cleveland the countertenor, Peter the IT expert, Gill the Churchwarden, Phil the engineer and Jonathan his son who is going to work in Pretoria in a school in his year off. Peter bought his video camera and set up in the garden and we got some good material from Robert, Cleveland and Lynn. I had a crack as well although when your are staring at the lense it gives you this feeling that you are talking wordy rubbish. Peter hadnt met any of them before but he and Cleveland were soon spotting new opportunities - eg with Cleveland's group of black opera singers in the UK. Lynn was a bit anxious that her lunch involved even more work - but her interview was really professional. Robert didnt pull his punches either.

The time we had with them was limited to about 90 minutes before I had to take them to the station - they are flying back tonight. One good point was that I was able to discuss with Lynn how the funding stream from the CDs could be linked be used as a nonproject specific source so she could try new stuff or meet immediate novel needs. I think Lynn's professional background plus my involvement in Government funding schemes is a useful match.

In the interview Peter asked me aboutthe links between producing the discs and what the money is for. I ended up talking about the strange things that go on in your mind when you are building a programme - all the strange unconcious links that emerge in how you order material - A B C D etc. One of Peter's ideas is to bring some African musicians in - through his links into the Commonwealth Partnership for Technology Management .

I said to Peter that the main hurdle is getting people with the money to understand what the links are - once they have got the links in their mind its pretty easy. I think Peter might be thinking of a CDRom to do this. He mentioned he had just invested �3000 in a multiple CD copier.

The other Peter - the guitarist - was talking on the phone yesterday about pulling together a CD of barn dance music using as starting point the stuff we did at Astrid Jahn's birthday party. I think that idea has a lot of strength - for a start to launch the thing you just have to organise a barn dance - which is something a lot of people round here really enjoy.

I have been watching some of the Freddie Mercury concert - and last night I saw the FM/Kenny Everett programme. The story was that as FM-KE became more successful in the 70s and early 80s they ramped up their life-styles especially in terms of sex and coke and eventually I kind of extended sexual network was created. One person, an ex-USSR soldier bought the virus into the group. The suggestion was also that coke didnt do much for Kenny - which raises the question of what it may or may not have done for Freddie.

The photographer who did the Serious Music cover was in the same art-school class as FM. The question which arises from this and other aspects is where on earth he got it all from. In amongst the filming of the performances were artists talking about the songs themselves. Brian May (who for me got better and better the more he spoke) said that the songs all relied at some point on cues from Freddie and that doing them with other artists involved re-engineering if they weren't to break down. To an outsider they sound tighter than that. Another observation was that although you might think that the songs were built round that one personality, other different personalities - eg Lisa Stansfield found them friendly vehicles for their won personal styles. Roger Daltrey was very sound on what it means for a group member to die in relation to the kind of very close communication that some kinds of music requires. With absolutely no posing at all he said it was "closer than family".