I awake, alert, around 5.15 am every morning, these days. Perhaps I should get up then, rather than stare at the strip of light between the gap in the curtains for three-quarters of an hour. 6.00 am: Drizzle. Thus … floor exercises: head to toe, by muscle group. Some of the stretches are now comfortable to do; others remain excruciating. Getting the abdominals taut is truly a pain. ‘And don’t forget to do your pelvic floor exercises too, John!’ 8.00 am: A communion:

8.30 am: Teaching admin: registers and tutorial notifications for the week ahead. 9.30 am: Studiology. The new suite completed, I reviewed ‘Saul>Paul’; I’d not heard this since last Friday, and so came to it with a fresh ear. It still sounded good. The new suite – an entire album’s worth of work – was conceived and executed in three days. (The biblical resonances proliferated.) The ‘Blind’ suite, on the other hand, has required many hours of dedication in order to complete just one minute of composition. The new suite was an unexpected gift (a blessing) from above, in this and many other respects.

11.00 am: To quote a line from Lou Reed’s ‘Heroin’: ‘I don’t know, just where I’m going’. And I like it, where composition is concerned. There’re times when the process of creation carries you with it, to goodness knows where. Each work possesses an inner impulse – a drive and a logic; you just have to find it. I listened to ‘Heroin’ and Reed’s magnificent ‘Perfect Day’ (my unfulfilled dream) over tea:

You made me forget myself
I thought I was
Someone else, someone good.

Onward. There was still a great deal of text to dissect and distribute along the beat spine.

1.40 pm: Following lunch, I walked to the School. Friday’s are quiet days, usually:

I met with other Fine Art staff. We carved up the territories like victorious generals, and allocate spaces in the studios for the coming undergraduate and postgraduate show. This is always a good-natured and considered negotiation. Mr Garrett had, again, ably prepared the way for our thinking and decision making:

3.30 pm: Back at homebase, I reviewed the morning’s work and commenced the third and final section of the composition. Ananias’ conversation with God is, in part, a restatement of the incidents narrated in part one. This will afford me the opportunity to interleave parts of it with the later text, and be wonderfully tricky to pull off. By the close of the afternoon, the dissection of the remainder of the Acts texts was completed, and the two accounts ordered. On Monday, I hope to substantially complete the ordering of the third section and, thus, the first draft of ‘Saul>Paul’.

7.30 pm: I endeavoured to complete the text for the new suite.