Shrove Tuesday

8.30 pm. At the School, I dispatched emails and cleared areas of the desk before escorting the ‘Chapels in Wales 8′ to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales (situated in the tax office, down the road):

There, Penny Icke took charge, and I returned to undertake overdue postgraduate admin. A full-day and full-steam ahead.

10.00 am. The first of two ‘off the radar tutorials’. 11.00 am. Peter Monaghan and Becky Backshall gave a robust response to my interrogations at the Vocational Practice module. There’s no better means to convince a group of artists in embryo that they are capable of succeeding than by presenting the example of new-born artists who are.

12.30 pm. My PhD student from Malvern had arrived.  We spent lunch and the remainder of the afternoon weaving in and out of conversational and tutorial mode. One of the main objectives in laying the foundations of a tutee-tutor relationship is understanding how each other thinks. That takes both time and a breadth of discussion which must, of necessity, range beyond the topic of study. A tutee’s opinions about literature, music, theatre, cinema, and the flight of birds may tell one a great deal about the sophistication of their intellect and aptitude for relational thought. As it did, indeed, in this case. Gold-star performance!

6.20 pm. Practise session 1. 7.20 pm. I spent the evening catching up on the day’s emails, administrating the registration of, and royalties pertaining to, the new CD, and making plans for a sound-art performance (not quite the right word) at the National Screen & Sound Archive, soon. Things move slowly; but move they must. 9.40 pm Practise session 2. My bedtime reading is The Writings of Marcel Duchamp: