8.00 am. I dealt with the more pressing emails before a time of reflection. Some days, and this was one, come with a sense of urgency and seriousness that conditions our attitude. We must rise to these occasions, believe, and act. 8.40 am. The good weather has persisted; its been a balm:

9.00 am. No takers for my morning Personal Tutor surgery, so I used the hour to confront postgraduate admin. 9.30 am. A meeting with Ms Kennedy, one of our secretaries, to discuss postgraduate scholarship applications. 10.00 am. The first of the MA Fine Art tutorials for the morning.

Some principles and observations derived from the morning’s engagements:

• What you’ve done, are doing, and will do are are connected by a chain of being.
• Don’t attempt to do everything every time you sit down to make an image. Be focussed, discriminate, strategic, and realistic.
• There’s no such thing as the muse. So, stop waiting for it; just get on with it.
• Do what is necessary, rather than that which is merely interesting.
• Teaching regenerates: the tutor feeds off the students’ residual energy.
• Don’t dunk your biscuit in another person’s tea.
• Art is only a clothes hanger onto which is hung something far more important.

10.45 am. A current staffing issue has necessitated a number of tutee temporary reassignments. Notifications and tutee allocation updates all round. 12.00 pm. The second MA Fine Art tutorial of the day:

2.00 pm. A little graphic-art practice for my church’s redesigned website. The banner needed a tease:

I spent the first year after my undergraduate working as a part-time graphic designer for a local South Wales valley company. I wasn’t trained to be one, but I reckoned that, having learned to draw, it was possible to do just about anything. And it paid the bills. 2.20 pm. Back to ‘Ways of Working with Sound’. I’m fond of drawing diagrams in PowerPoint. I developed a sense of forward momentum that had been lacking on this project, previously. Such a turn of events has often come the moment when I perceived the end from the beginning, and the whole fell into its component pieces.

6.30 pm. Practise session 1. Now that I was in the groove with the workshop project, I determined to maintain velocity for the remainder of the evening, or at least for as long as I could before an inevitable en passe was reached.

I was distracted, occasionally. Through the rain drizzled panes of my study window I could see the lights of Bronglais Hospital, where a colleague was convalescing. An outbreak of the Norovirus on their ward has prevented family and friends from visiting. But my thoughts and prayers were not likewise barred from entering. (In our minds, we can walk through walls):