I have spent time on the putative lullabye (must learn how to spell this) � Reading&sleeping. I put some guitar lines on this morning and in the process I think I stumbled across the reason why humbuckers are so called. Whey you plug them straight into the desk they make less noise! I expect this was another Les Paul discovery. Anyway I put some lines on with the Osaka Les Paul. There are times when its just the right guitar for the song � or the mood I happen to be in. I like playing it without much in the way of amp distortion � fairly diatonically with bends. It teaches you the song from a new point of view � new positions. It hasn�t got the strong mid frequency signature of a Gibson but you can push in that direction once the line is down.

I am wondering whether I need to go back into the original WAV that I am embellishing and do some precision edits � flattening the odd peak in the vocals. We�ll see. Crudely I am using SS type techniques on a track of a much earlier vintage. Maybe this one will take some time � I might even go back to the original 4 track double speed cassette vocal recording. I am finding the latency in Cubase a bit of a drag � heaven knows why I have just started to notice this- have flicked some switch to make it appear?

Paul mailed to ask whether his Lullabye had gone to the wrong house again � it had but fortunately his neighbours now know that weird packages they don�t recognise belong in No 1. We talked a bit more about Hejira � and started wondering what state our tapes/cassettes of the Capital sessions were in. I sent Justin the first copy of 10SS and 4 Fifths shipped in anger � with a few explanatory notes. I �ll be interested to get his reaction to some of the value propositons.

Peter Chatterton and I exchanged mails following our conference in the bear and flagstaff last night. He has put up some really interesting links on www.kwase-kwaza.org which go to sites design give a better focus on what its actually like in Iraq. There is some quite interesting debate in the News section discussing how Australia�s approach to HIV testing might be used in India. There�s also a story in the Times suggesting the Government might adopt something like it here. Its rather peverse that the biggest impact of all those HIV positive people in Southern Africa from the perspective of the UK is when we notices that a vanishing small percentage of them end up here and start boosting our stats. A significant jump in the UK is a few thousand extra cases. In Africa you get millions of new cases every year � millions more than the total you had the previous year.

My boss and I compared notes about yesterday. I sketched a financial model to drive our sales pitch which I think we both quite liked. I phoned the company that looks like it has won the procurement procurement and told them the next phase we wanted to go through. It must be a real drag trying to sell something to a team which is an ex purchasing director from the automotive sector and someone who has done a fair amount of structured Government procurement. �In the next stage we want you to stand on your head so that all the loose change falls out your pocket and then we will deduct that sum from the unit price.� The model came out of listening to Peter go through the logic of his procurement method three times � suddenly a penny dropped.

I may have engineered an extension to my trip to the USA in 10 days time to take in Detroit. Fingers crossed. Well actually it would take in Canada and Detroit which is just across the river. I stayed in Canada last year for a night and I thought the CDs were really really cheap � I got a very interesting �early drafts� CD of Steely Dan for next to nothing. I must check out whether the Detroit Institute of Art opens on a Sunday.

I have started listening to that P J Harvey album that won a prize not so long ago � actually its James copy. When I first heard it I thought it was just ordinary � but the other night one of the songs suddenly registered, Its beginning to sound like Ms P Smith (who spent some years in the Detroit suburbd raising her family.

I swapped couple of e-ms with David Jennings � I was his boss for a bit in DTI and then he got promoted and put in charge of the Chemicals Industry. He did a strategy event for his team and asked me to do something on creativity � it was in Alexander Palace. We did various exercises � one was on reversal � the technique where you try to get new angles on how to achieve your objective by considering how you would achieve the opposite. So we did an exercise on how to promote the consumption of illegal drugs � to illuminate how one might come up with new drug use reduction strategies. His team were incredibly inventive on the drug promotion front � and very very funny too. It made me think how hard it is to reduce drug consumption.

I did something tonite that I hadn�t done here � in Guildford yes, Leamington no. I linked the Casio Cz101 to the Casio DH500 and took the audio into the mixer, in parallel took the audio from the DH into the same mix. I hadn�t forgotten just what an extraordinary sound that is � the degree of variation in timbre available by hitting various buttons and switches is vast � on top of that is the nuance that lies between the breath control on the DH and how this is relayed to the CZ. There is a hint of this on the Stravinsky busk on Serious Music.,

Anyway this little foray led to a major insight � that the Lullabyes CD will have a solo flute version of God Bless the Child.