Channel 5 programme last night on The Battle of Stalingrad - very good especially in terms of the range of historians giving views. One made the point that the German military strategy was based on the idea of quality. The Soviet response was based on quantity under the dialectical maxim that quantity has a quality all its own. One might add - especially in Winter.

I didnt realise that after the encirclement a relief force from the main German Army got within thirty miles of the encircled Sixth Army - really pretty close. But the encirclement limited supplies and reduced the capability of the Sixth Army to fight their way out.

A major mistake of the Germans was to bomb the city at an early stage in the siege. The bombing just made the city much more defensible. Normally the Germans avoided getting involved in street fighting - but it seems the symbolism of taking the town named after Stalin got the better of them to such an extent that they poured resources into the salient creating an enormous vulnerability in terms of encirclement.

There's no doubt the drama of this story will continue capture the imagination of historians for centuries to come. However you can debate the extent to which this is was the decisive battle compared with Kursk or the subsequent battle in East Poland.

I was talking to someone (Stefan) yesterday whose father comes from East Poland and who has just died. (Its Stefan's Amiga that I have acquired.) His father was born in 1924 and lied his way into the Polish Army when the Germans attacked. He was captured and sent to a camp in Austria and after a couple of years escaped from there and made his way down into Italy until he met the advancing allies. The allies immediately signed him up and put him into the Military Police where he became a dog handler.

At the end of the war he was given the choice of going to the UK or Poland and chose the former. In fact that part of Poland was in the zone affected by the border shifts which took place at the start and the finish of the War and so he knew that he was better off trying the UK. Throughout his life he was really resistant to the idea of returning to his hometown on the grounds that he believed his safety could not be guaranteed.

In talking this over with Stefan I remembered how the majority of the Berlin Jews who survived the war were teenagers - the agre group that is tough resourceful and risk taking which gives them much better survival skills than older or young people. Stefan's father's life from 15 to 21 illustrates this perfectly .

James has finished his exams and is relaxing with his mates. He was talking about one of his friends who has got a girlfriend who lives up the hill from here. The impression that he gave was that hw would find the kind of demands which the girl made on his friend very irksome and by implication he preferred his current single but self-determining status.

The next task for him is to work out what he is going to do with the next 15 months. My inappropriate advice would be - look for a gig at the back of the Melody Maker - but its closed. There is also the small matter of getting a university place - an issue which James avoided this year on the advice of Penny's wife who is a Professor at LSE.

In Birmingham, they were saying goodbye to a girl who was just finishing a year's placement with them before she went to University. Steve who works with Stefan is going to let me have the address of the organisation that set the placement up. Stefan's daughter is going to Oxford to read history - which I expect cheered her grandfather up a lot.

Keith Ellis the melodeon player delivered ten copies of Plundafonix that he very kindly made for me. Today there is an "open day" at Holy Trinity and I need to stock the Tradecraft stall just in case. I am not overoptimistic about selling "cold" like this but your never know. When I called in at the Holy Trinity office to get Keith's address I bumped into the openday organiser who roped me in. I have to do the CD covers which normally I enjoy but last night for some reason I found a bit tedious - another eight to do.

I listened to some John Adams that I recorded off air from the R3 Adamsfest. I wasn't sure about the String Quartet 10 Alleged Dances but some of the orchestrations of other composers sounded better to me - especially some Ives songs and a Lizst hommage to Wagner.