Paul Wheeler mailed to say how alarmed he was at the Indian situation. His alarm made me more alarmed. There was some stuff on Reuters listed on Globalwatch on this subject � must really get Chris�s inside view.

Gilbert mailed to say he liked SS4 and SS5 � the former in the simpler version. So on the strength of this I mailed him SS7 and he mailed back saying that he thought it would be OK if I took out the backwards guitar passages � which I am listening to now. That is the version without the backwards guitar � to me it sounds like Northern European jazz - which is probably a good thing � its cycling in a kind of rocks and frozen wastes way just now.

I dropped in at the guitar shop after work � they were interested to know how I was getting on with the U2 � we talked about using it for slide. I said it sounded good with obscure classic simulations like the Vox AC 15. I bought a Peavey mike � with a balanced plug � quite a reasonable price. I got in and cooked the rest of the beef and ate it as a curry. I really didn�t feel like going out again and fell asleep listening to John Zorn SQs � strange but true. Anyway I dragged myself out into the rain at about 9.20pm.

I ended up talking to a group of Warwick U postgrads about the nature of mathematics. I suggested there is no governing paradigm � a very pretty girl said that it was in a fundamental sense symbolic play � well there�s a thought to conjour with. They had come to hear Gavin Band who has just finished his maths PhD at Warwick. Maybe that�s what you need for some kind of jazz scene � an intelligentsia

I sat in for all the second set � we did Girl from Ipanema, Autumn Leaves, You Don�t Know What Love Is, Green Dolphin St, Lullaby of Birdland, Bags Grove � split between flute and Dhorn. They invited me back next week � which is about the best one can ask for � the philosophy of maths was a bonus. Next week may be I will take my Roland Cube 20 watt and the CZ101 too.

I had a long talk to John McCartney � who remembers buying his first bass off Noel Redding before he rose to distinction � I didn�t think he was that old. We remembered how good Jim Morrisey used to sound in Soho in the 60s � and discovered we�d both been influenced by Jimmy Smith.

We also talked about Jung and composing at the computer. So fingers crossed. John said there were more dimensions to play with a trio which is an encouraging sign. He was playing a Peavey fretless this week � it had cost him �80 and he had taken the frets out himself. His technique is extraordinary � very very fast on the chords when he wants to be but laying back and lyrical when he wants. I said to him that I had an idea about doing a MfHV CD of standards and that maybe he would want to do some stuff for that. We talked about Steve Reich a bit and attempts to use his techniques in the Broadway tradition � and also the way he had been sucked into the British animation scene � the studio which ended up making Roger Rabbit.

Apart from that I found myself falling into a bit of a lull at work � we had a meeting with Richard who is doing project co-ordination on the Academy. There is a meeting with the Professor of Engineering at Coventry University on Monday morning at 9.00am. I circulated some suggestions on a forum to bridge the gap between the Automotive Summit and and the Foresight Vehicle Technology Route Map vision of integrated manufacture. The aim is to get �100k over a three year period � ie cover my salary, expenses etc. Well if there�s a good band in the offing it�s a reason for keeping the show on the road. This is a follow up to some ideas which came up at the Management Meeting on Monday. I discussed tactics initially with Keith Jordan.

I have got to get to Salford Quays tomorrow by midday. I am thinking of going up the East side of the Pennines on the M1 and then over the hills on the M62. I don�t fancy the M6 � which is permanently not working according to the radio reports I get when I am driving into work.

I called Tracy who is still at home with a broken ankle � and thanked her for the book about New York poetry and art. She fell over on her doorstep and broke a couple of bones and did something else too � she was hospitalised and had a lot of trouble with drugs and the plaster casing. She said that she hadn�t been able to read as much as she would have liked. We discussed the eccentricities of our respective workplaces. She gave me her AOL address so maybe I will mail her some of the Short Story music.

Emboldened by my apparent success I put down about 60 bars of an electric country blues � Mr Abraham when my lamb gonna come / You getting out your flick-knife � what have I done wrong. I had meaning to attempt this. U2 and a virtual Tweed with tremelo.

THURSDAY: I left Leamington and went up the M42 to the M1 � the River Trent looked ferocious � there�s a new service area in Charnwood Forest on some of the oldest rocks in England. I bought a copy of the Times and saw an interesting comment about a Gordon Brown comment in Cabinet about the need to preserve the public sector ethos � contra the Blairite view that the reform of public service means more market disciplines. An artful shift in position probably reflecting some realpolitik within the New Labour ranks and some consolidation of the Scots Labour values.

There was an hour�s discussion on R4 as I went up the M42 on the significance of realism in Victorian fiction. Two of the participants that it was a valid exploration of the space between different partial perspectives on reality influenced by emerging mass media techniques like reportage. On this view George Eliot is the great realist. A N Wilson on the other hand gave more weight to C18 and C20 sceptical ideas about the feasibility of penetrating the veils of illusion � his opponents thought the Victorians were right in judging it was the artist�s duty to try. This kind of realism was bound to a view of the importance of community as against the radical subjectivism of the 2nd wave Romantic poets. I thought this was all pretty good stuff � quite accessible while being pretty serious. It seemed to me that the new communal realists were a kind of post postmodernism.

I have started to read Wilfred Mellers on Schubert � his invention of the song as a means of expressing the individual point of view.

I took exit 36 and went over the Peak District and down the valley which has Glossop at the foot � a sombre, stark and impressive landscape especially on a day like today. The hour after midday was less fun and I nearly got taken for an assassin of Prince Charles who was visiting the Skills Convention. The police were quite jumpy. I was fraught about finding my hotel in time .

Salford Quays is like other dockland redevelopments � like Yokohama for example � lots of big architecture and large expanses of water with the occasional really striking piece. Often lots of wind and rain � certainly in Manchester today. At the Quays the Lowry Arts Centre and the Imperial War Museum of the North are opposite one another � the latter has the really knockout profile. I haven�t seen any of the exploding fireworks from the fire that has made the news headlines.

Jon Snow chaired the afternoon event � which started shakily but then picked up. I met several interesting people in the first coffee break and took lots of notes during the question and answer session. There were a couple of good leads in terms of global corporations� current thinking on leadership training. They gave us a dinner at Old Trafford and Ricky Gervais was the after dinner fun � a bit excessive as a gesture but pretty funny nonetheless. I sat at a table with two people who do careers advice in Cornwall so there was plenty to talk about.

Friday morning was group discussions � I felt OK about my input and picked up two potentially good leads. The Minister�s final speech was quite good considering.

I decided that the Imperial War Museum rather than the Lowry was the target. I find certain architecture really highly charged and this building certainly falls into that category � it�s a real wonder � an expression of the thought that war changes people�s lives. It also has a T34 in it � what more can I say? A decisive artefact in curved space. The Lowry suffers from the fact that when you have experienced the wonder of the IWM you emerge and look at its silly bitty pomo conceits and draw the obvious conclusions.

The Lowry was selling off slow moving books � like Marjoirie Walsh�s Signifying Art � Essays on Art after 1960 which starts with Rauschenberg and finished with Sol Le Witt. I read most of the latter after lunch � I think it is of a piece with R Serra�s explanation of his undertakings � that you commit to a fundamental novel paradigm out of a process of creative intellection � in Sol�s case it is a three dimensional grid and then you work that hard. She compares him to Boulez for example. Its good to think about these ideas in terms of different approaches I have taken to Gilbert�s short stories. I suppose that was Richard Wollheim�s idea in Art and Its Objects � that the object has to be understood in terms of the antecedent idea stream.

The inevitable mall was selling three CDs for �10 � my three were 78 minutes of the great Coltrane 4tet, the chamber music of Gerhard Stabler which includes the Ardittis and the Ensemble Moderne and a really interesting double CD of Michael Mantler�s music setting Becket and Pinter. He gets Jack Bruce, Don Cherry, Carla Bley, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Coyne and Chris Spedding to deliver. The material was recorded between 1973 and 1976. Its art rock really � like Henry Cow � rock as modernism � but extraordinary good value. Stabler seems to be late modernism too.

And here�s a quote from Marje � �The semantics of syntax that had determined style during the early 20th century grew into a cultural pre-occupation in the 1960s and 1970s because by then constitutive orders had become identifiably signs of modern art��Pollock�s constitutive synthesis of stroke and all-over organisation is a definitive form in modern art � if not its standard and stereotype. At the same time Hewman rending space by a line -codifying space by a single stroke � also codified a modern form�.

I think I can detect a bout of hypochondria coming on.