8.15 am. Pruned my inbox before setting up for a 9.15 am class:

This was on ‘Socialmedia & ProfessionalPromotion’ for the BA Creative Arts students. Only two takers. I was informed that attendance has been an ‘issue’ on this course. It finished earlier than anticipated (one can grill two students for only so long), so I’d time to interview a BA applicant who’d just arrived from Essex.

11.15 pm. Back at homebase, I concluded a little admin before returning to the sound studio to complete the process of creating initial mixdown masters of The Aural Bible II tracks:

To be really good at doing something, you need patience, persistence, and endurance, and only a modicum of talent. Having listened to Friday’s masters, I decided to do them all again; not because they were lacking, but because a second attempt might elicit an improvement. This proved to be the case.

2.00 pm. The process of amelioration often goes hand in hand with the principles of simplification and doing less; that is to say, not interfering with the work without call or perceivable effect … learning to have a lighter touch. I was taught fine art in this manner. My lecturers prescribed a course of action only reluctantly, and only when I’d come to the end of my own resources. And even then, they edged me in the direction of possibilities rather than presented readymade solutions. Moreover, I was taught only when I needed to be taught (and this was something that I, principally, was expected to discern), rather than on the basis of a regular tutorial regime. In those days, art education was constrained by neither a timetable (except for the few art history lectures and seminars we were expected to attend) nor a curriculum. Such liberality would not be tolerated today. I learned to be resourceful and to look to myself. The best teaching, in my opinion, develops the art student’s capacity for autodidacticism.  Without it, they’ll not continue to learn when outside an educational institution. All other pedagogical ‘aims and outcomes’ are very secondary.

3.50 pm. Mixdown masters are complete. On to a student reference before updating my task list and re-engaging with the book project plans. I’m learning, again, to write in notebooks with a pencil (as opposed to directly onto a computer). The two Creative writing students I taught this morning composed their own work similarly. (Surely, this was a sign.) I bought a small box of these orangey cardboard file folders from a retail stationers on City Road, Cardiff when I first lived in that city back in 1981-2. They reminded me of the exercise books that I’d used in primary school. (There must be some elements of continuity throughout one’s life.) I’ve used them, on occasion, ever since:

6.15 pm. Practise session 1: guitar direct to amp.  7.20 pm. Bookish thoughts, again. How does a new book emerge, for me? Usually on the back of ideas that have been either turning over in my head for several years or, also, cautiously aired in conference papers. Such is the case on this occasion. Thereafter, it emerges sentence by sentence. One only has to begin writing (lots and for a long time) and … bingo! Nothing to it.