Gilbert Isbin has sent me a link to him playing some modern compositions on lute - 5 songs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7BAygWmG3g

More vids here

http://users.telenet.be/gilbert.isbin/contents.html

This music isn't the slightest bit archaic - some of it reminds me a bit of Bartok's Mikrokosmos.

There were some 200 e/ms waiting for me - my links are up to 52 now. A lot of the e/ms were from the FT and also from Object Oriented Philosophy. The google alerts seem to work quite well on Local Enterprise Partnerships.

I looked up various places we had visited in Provence - for example the Chateau Javon which is the only building in a forest on the Vaucluse Plateau. It originally belonged to the Bishop of Carpentras, Also the village of Roussillon which is where Samuel Beckett moved to during the war to get away from Paris. Roussillon is famous for the rich deposits of ochre pigments found in the clay near the village. Large quarries in Roussillon were mined from the end of the eighteenth century until 1930. Nowadays the mining of ochre is prohibited in order to protect the sites from complete destruction. It is full of tourist tat these days but the village is also mentioned in Waiting for Godot . All around the area are ceramic craftsmen who use the ochre pigments in their work. The village of Gordes is nearby which hangs off the side of the plateau and looks very picturesque.

I looked at the route taken across France by the TGV � the middle bit was the region of Burgundy which seemed to be rather deserted. The train by-passed Paris just stopping at Charles de Gaulle airport.

I watched the BBC2 film with Michael Caine as a demented magician, then the Cronenberg film about Russian gangsters in London and finally MC again in the Ipcress File.