8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Just keeping a breast of medical affairs is becoming a major project. I’m far more aware of having to push, advocate, and making connections between the NHS, GPs, and specialists than I did just two years ago. It’s too easy to get lost in the system. Flares have to be fired periodically. The structures (as distinct from those that work within them) of care are failing. Structures cannot dispose love and attention. Only people can. However, inefficient structures can prevent medical professionals from doing their job effectively. Structures that are fit for purpose arise out of the needs of people, and the capacity and resources professionals to meet them. Too often, today, structures are developed independently of, and imposed upon, such. Impossible demands arise as a result.

9.00 am: Teaching and research admin were the priority of the morning. I began my annual stocktake of research outputs in preparation for a forthcoming review. (Why do I feel as though I’m looking down the barrel of a gun on these occasions?) Occasionally, I’ve been posting reproductions of visual work, made quite awhile ago in some cases,  as a series entitled ‘My Art History’, on Facebook. For me, this is a further mode of stocktaking on a broader temporal scale. The most recent publications are of drawings made, direct from life, through the windows of wherever I was living at the time. Today, I’d not be able to justify this type of practice as ‘research’ in the manner in which HE defines that term. ‘Just’ drawing would not be conceived as evidencing sufficient intellectual endeavour in relation to a definable problematic or inquiry:

Two Houses (1988) pencil on paper, 39.9 × 38 cm

1.30 pm: Off to the School:

And down the Soddy Laboratory’s corridor to meet with my first MA tutee of the afternoon:

2.40 pm: Off, then to the Old College for my second MA tutorial. An apparition on Pier Street:

4.50 pm: Homeward.

6.30 pm: Practise session. 7.30 pm: Admin followed by a return to my research profiles, where I’d left off during the morning session.

On reflection: There are times when our work drags us around a corner when we’re looking in another direction. It can come as quite a surprise. There we were, thinking about going over there, but are now … over here. But ‘here’ feels right … as though we belong, as though we’d been here before. Two case studies: In the first, the ‘here’ represented a more abstract and, apparently, non-intentional version of work made to date; in the second, the ‘here’ represented a figurative and observed version of work made to date. In both cases, the artists are required to integrate the ‘here’ with what has been. Often this is a natural rather than a forced fusion that occurs in time: the gradual assimilation of, and adaptation to, the one by the other.