I have just come back from a weekend with friends who breed champion alpacas. Their traditional country house on the edge of the Cotswolds is surrounded by these docile creatures, which look like they are wearing woolly trousers. It’s an odd sight but I like it. It reminds me of last summer when I was touring the US and suddenly began to spot alpacas all around the country. In some areas they are as common a sight in the fields as cows are over here.

As I stood by their field, I daydreamed about farming them myself. I had to force myself to remember that I can’t fit that in at the moment, so I may adopt one of my friends’ animals. I’d have to keep it at Great Tew, where they live, as I don’t have a field where I can keep it these days. A number of years ago I used to have a stud farm, but pressure of work meant I wasn’t around the animals as much as I would like, so I had to give it up. Although I’m not a rider I find horses fascinating. They are such big things and yet a little person can get a horse to do what they want.

After my country weekend, it’s back to the album I’ve been working on since January. Before I can begin work on any album, I have to observe an important ritual: cleaning. It clears my head. Everything in the studio must be cleaned, dusted and tidied. It takes as long as it takes – sometimes even two days.

Then I check my recording software, select my guitars, ensuring they have new strings, and set up the computer ready to record. I play everything myself – guitar, keyboards, mandolin, mouth organ, whatever, and record on to Apple’s Logic Pro 8 software, which is much easier than the old analogue tape recording. Before starting the actual writing, I unwind with a cup of hot water with nothing in it, not even a slice of lemon – I’ve never drunk alcohol.

I can typically work from 6am and finish at 8am the following morning. I have to be completely alone when working – other people only get involved when it comes to mixing the album. Such solitary existence means no one prompts me to do normal things like eating, drinking and sleeping. It is only when I’m about to keel over that I remember to rest and refuel.

After my self-imposed isolation in the countryside, returning to city life in London is a shock to the system. I am horrified to see someone chuck a cigarette butt out of his car window and, later, someone else openly dropping their hamburger packaging in the street. Sometimes I challenge these litterbugs – they usually react positively, probably because I remind them of their mother.

As part of a recording I am doing for a Radio 4 series on guitarists called Joan’s Journeys, which will go out in July, I meet classical guitarist John Williams at a Soho studio.

John and I started playing at about the same age, he at 12, me at 13. John was trained by some great classical musicians, including Andrés Segovia, but his main teaching was from his father. I am self-taught. I got my first guitar from a pawn shop. My mum acquired it in exchange for two old prams.

John and I are from different disciplines. Classical training says you can’t do it like this or that, but I see mistakes as happy accidents. I have found some classically trained musicians envy my freedom.

It’s a relief to swap the studio’s electric lights for the spring sunshine. I walk along Piccadilly to the Royal Institution of Great Britain in Albemarle Street to meet the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, who is giving this year’s Women of the Year lecture next Wednesday. I’ve been involved with Women of the Year first as a guest at their annual lunch and then much later on as a member of the council and now as president.

Susan, who will speak about the effect on the brain of our use of technology, takes me through to the Faraday Theatre – a venue which manages to be both intimate and imposing. Susan epitomises what Women of the Year is about. She’s an achiever in a world dominated by men and she’s clever, spirited, bright, engaging and infectious. She acts like someone who’s just discovering stuff instead of someone who knows it all already.

I feel sure that the Women of the Year Lunch’s founder, the late journalist and author Lady Tony Lothian, would have loved Susan. Tony was a remarkable woman who founded the organisation in 1955 having being told a lunch club she wanted to attend was “for men only”. When she first invited me to this lunch 30 years ago, she explained that she wanted to encourage and celebrate high-achieving women from all backgrounds, all races, colour, creeds and all walks of life.

This year, between 400 and 500 guests will attend the lunch at a London hotel in October. They are chosen by our nominating council of 40 women, themselves high achievers. But we also encourage nominations via magazines, our website and from any individual who wants to put themselves forward. Up to four awards are given each year to women who have helped their community or the wider world in a spectacular way.

An invitation to the annual lunch has to be earned on the merits of the current year. So, like many of the guests who come to the lunch, I have not been to every single event over the past 30 years. Now, as president, I attend each lunch. It is an amazing feeling to be surrounded by so many high-achieving women – from scientists to shepherdesses to children’s hospice founders to mountaineers to those who have endured hardship and torture.

Susan’s lecture will explore the quest for identity in our shiny new technological age. Technology and the internet interest me, as they do most people in the music industry – it can be such a positive force for any creative person.

But I do worry about the impact of technology on young people. I am baffled by Twitter, for instance. Why do you need to tell gazillions of people out there that you’ve just had breakfast or picked your nose? I am a very private person, which is perhaps why I can’t see the point of this endless stream of trivia.

It’s time to get back to the studio and engage with some useful technology. No more time to dream of alpacas, I’ve got to think about words and music.

The 2009 Women of the Year lecture is by Baroness Greenfield on April 22. www.womenoftheyear.co.uk