The swings and roundabouts of outrageous fortune.

8.15 am: A thoroughly departmental day, today. I dealt with the night season’s incoming mail and pushed on to town, where I picked up store boxes before attending to business at the School. There, I assembled my handout for the noontide workshop on the hill:

After confirming arrangements for the transportation of equipment to and from the National Library on Monday, I returned to homebase to work my way through a tranche of bitty admin jobs related to teaching and research. (‘Music, maestro, please!’)

11.30 am: Up the hill, to IBERS. The building is one of the most successful pieces of architecture on the campus. Good (café style) teaching spaces too:

I held a workshop on ‘Writing a Conference Paper’ for the university’s PhD students (who were drawn from the sciences and social sciences). The session went well. Although, in retrospect, I could have made more effort to draw out the more reflective attendees:

1.05 pm: I hurried back to homebase for a express lunch before returning to the School for an arranged tutorial with one of Dr Forster’s final-year painters. I recorded the tutorial in preparation for my paper on one-to-one tutorials for the Aber Teaching Conference.

2.45 pm: The news is out! Looks like I’m really going to have to do it, then:

Back at homebase, I ‘Blackboarded’ the morning’s teaching, shared the recorded tutorial with the tutee, and infiltrated by inbox to eradicate all bold type deposits. My diary for the first week of term is beginning to fill. With Tuesday taken up at the National Library of Wales, the teaching for that day has to find another slot later in the week.

7.30 pm: And again … of the same order. A workaday sort of day. Most of life is made up of the unspectacular, the mundane, and familiar. Our attitude to, and performance of, ‘the trivial round and common task’ can be a telling indicator of personal integrity and determination.