8.00 am: Breakfast. The town today looked like one of Pierre Adolphe Valette’s scenes of Manchester in the fog. (He’d had a significant influence on Lowry’s early work.):

Back at the stables, I packed and uploaded the last two days’ dairy, while recapping the dismal world news for the same period. 8.45 am: Off to the station, ridiculously early (as ever). 9.35 am: I caught the Holyhead train for Shrewsbury. The rail strikes ‘oup norwth’ and ‘darn sarth’ haven’t effected the routes home (yet). ‘All travel tickets, please!’, the conductor requested. What other kind of tickets are there? Like the term ‘the next station stop’ (announced on the train’s Tannoy (that dates me)), the term is a tautology.

Courtesy of Arriva Trains Wales’ free and efficient wifi, I reviewed unread mail. I’d been invited to write an essay on sonification for a book on transmediality. Would this be either relevant or necessary for me to do? Do I have time for this? When it doubt … defer a response until some clarity of conviction emerges. The refreshments trolley man entered the carriage advertising ‘tea, coffee, cold drinks, serpent’s venom …’. I was reminded of the departing advice given by the air hostess on a small US interstate airline that I once travelled on: ‘Please remember to take with you all your personal belongings (and any one else’s personal belongings, for that matter)’. Only when we depart from the script are we likely to be memorable. A lesson for life.

At Cardiff, yesterday, I’d time to retrace my old circuits and haunts, where I lived out my days in the early 1980s. I walked from the city centre, to the National Museum Wales, City Road, Kincraig Street, Albany Road, Donald Street, Hendy Street, and Roath Park (which is to Cardiff what Central Park is to New York.) I’d forgotten quite how long the distances between these places were. (I must have been hardier then.) ‘Those were the days’, I was tempted to think. But these are the days, now. Better days than those in so many ways. There’s a peculiar melancholy about revisiting places from which you’ve been distant for some time. In returning, you experience them through the lens of memory; what was and what is are one and the same. I need to go back in order to lay to rest their ghosts too, sometimes.

I’ve never given much thought to the future. Unlike the past and the present, it has neither substance, definition, nor certainty. However, I do reflect (too often) upon an alternative or a para-present. These reflections are idealist rather than fantastical. (There’s always a better life, a better self, to reach for.) The trick is knowing what from the imaginary can be realised in reality. They are not always so far apart. However, some things cannot happen … and for good reason. (God, only, knows the better way. And hard that way may prove.)

11.29 am: A smooth transition from one train to another. The entrance to Shrewsbury station was chocolate-o-bloc with travellers. Homeward. An opportunity to catch up with colleagues and students on Messenger.

1.15 pm: My younger son greeted me as I passed over the threshold, and regaled me with his research about mutational differences in birdsong, species, mating, and sexual reproductivity (being the topic of his dissertation). After a recuperative cup of tea, I unpacked. These days, there’s very little news to come home to; news follows you everywhere by every means: phones, pads, computers, and so forth. One can’t any longer ‘get away from it all’ in the fullest sense of the term.

5.00 pm: An end. 5.30 pm: Elder son returns. 7.30 pm: An evening with my family.