Yvonne went to see someone she knew at university who is living in a hostel in Camberwell. He has lived for a long time in Turkey - Ismia - but came to this country for a hip operation which went wrong the first time. Increasingly he felt he was becoming psychotic and so he checked himself into the Maudsley but they didnt agree and so they put him out to this hostel. Penny - Yvonne's oldest friend had been very supportive of this individual for a long time but has now lost her sympathy for him. Some parallels with the ND story you might say.

Meanwhile Jake and I walked downstream along the River Wey from the edge of Guildford. The river loops to the left and right round slightly higher tongues of land the first of which has Sutton Place on it - a palace which Henry VIII built - and the second of which carries the old road which runs past the Silent Pool over the top of the Downs and down the dipslope to cross the river at Old Woking. In some places the Navigation and the river share the same channel and in other places they diverge as the navigation clings to a contour or takes the quicker route. The valley of the river is quite wide and is mostly meadow - it would be fantastic except that the A3 is nearby and you can hear the noise of the traffic - which doesnt ruin the place completely at all - it just reminds you that this valley isnt as timeless as it might seem. I listened to a late Nono string quartet - 1980 - which peopel see as an example of timeless absolute music. Griffiths says:

"In Nono it is the silence of the word that is most important. Most of his works have departed from the conventions of the normal concert but here he abides by them jealously. It is part of the ritual that the performers do not speak... to mix words with the music of a quartet is almost indecent. In a complete reversal of what happens in a song, it is the text (from Holderlin) that guides performers towards a proper interpretation."

One of the things I didnt do yesterday was to write the text for Fifths in the version I going to send to Paul and Carol.

I produced a version of Fifths - with different timbres from the first. A Cubase file from the old PC went to the new PC to access some novel synth timbres and after some MIDI mixing the track was reduced to a WAV. This was looped and an audio feed put into the desk. The D-Horn was miked acoustically (on dynamic and condenser) but I also took a MIDI line into the CZ101 and the output to the desk. As I added the line I changed the CZ101 patches on the fly. Then the whole thing went back into Cubase and added a guitar line via Pandora which I editted this into a dialogue. Then back out as a WAV mixdown for some effects. As always it will be a while before I know what I make of it.

I also did some more work on You Are Here - changed the key to E minor - sketched an all guitar version of the verse. I was going to say that I thought the line was wierd - and that's maybe not what I mean. As I first learned it I thought it odd that the line was all chord notes (or almost all) but when you learn it on the guitar it seems that the dynamics and energy of the whole sentence is the important thing. The song is two sentences with a lot of internal contrasts in each plus an upward striving and unresolved vamp.

I enjoyed Cassandra doing Wichita Lineman - some people think it is too mannered. The first time we took the family to the USA we stayed in 1930s motel one night which is on one of the few remaining bits of Route 66. Yvonne and Vita shared the pool with some genuine Hells Angels but lived to tell the tale. They had a singer in the restaurant - playing a Nashville Tele and some bass pedals and he said that if you had a request you should write it on a piece of paper and give it to the waitress. I wrote down "Anything By Jim Webb". He opened the paper and straightway took voice two hands two feet into that song. "Oh he's passed" was what I thought - although he nearly made me cry with his delivery

Vita's film was well received this week - she editted from digital to VHS herself which impressed me. James is relaxing between A-Levels with the most gruesome collection of experiences of Vietnam he could find. We talked about the article in the London Review of Books that links the rise and fall of liberalism as a political force in the US to the 20th century experience of war.

Jake and I had had a sniff round Andertons. There was a Johnson amp modeller which is the only one with SPDIF out for a �150 and Roland MIDI controller with Souncanvas thrown in for �99 plus a novel yellow Strat with a single bridge Humbucker. Didn't have my wallet with me much to Jake's relief.