8.30 am. Heavy weather bearing down:

9.00 am. A morning of postgraduate tutorials. Some principles and observations:

• Do the most difficult thing in the hardest manner for the best reasons.
• Be always planning, promoting, communicating, and reflecting.
• Talk to yourself, either out loud or in writing.
• Cleaning the studio clears the mind.
• A bad idea is sometimes a good idea at the wrong time.
• Fear repetition more than failure.
• Truffles grow best in dung.

An art school without students is like a body without a soul. Their absence (for the most part) is a little unnerving at times:

11.00 am. A tutorial cancellation bought me time to clear my room of what was no longer needed on voyage. I rummaged through desk draws that had not been opened in over a year. Evidently, their contents were already redundant. 12.00 pm. My final tutorial for the morning, followed by an advisory session with a go-ahead recent fine-art graduate. It was heartening to hear of the Ceredigion Art Trail’s ambitions.

1.40 pm. Email catch-up. 2.00 pm. A review and tinker with the first essay on the composition for ‘The Wounded Heart Ministries’. It sounds better than it did yesterday. Why is that? Have my ears become better attuned? Do I come to it with a different temper? The change can be only in myself:

2.20 pm. On with the new Abstraction art history module. I’ve seven lectures and four seminars to compose before the beginning of Semester 1. Music maestro, please!: Some suitably abstract sound work by the Fluxus member Yasunao Tone — Musica Iconologos. The album notes appear to be the cack-handed translation of a Japanese text. Or else, they’re appallingly written; or else, I’m more than usually dense today. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating engagement with the concept of what a picture might sound like. I should revise the last lecture of the module to include an overview of digital abstract art. The module needs to be bang up-to-date. Can I, then, justify not including a discussion on abstract art and sound? A second Art/Sound module dealing with sound art practice during the last decade is required to palliate my enthusiasm.

All my lectures are, first, drafted in notes (on graph paper, appropriately, for this module), and in pencil, section by section. Each section is, then, worked up as a verbatim text (around 4,500 words) in parallel with the PowerPoint presentation — which I regard as 50% of the whole:

This method ensures that content depth and the narrative flow go hand in hand. A fruitful afternoon, and I’m warming to my subject. But I’ll need all day tomorrow to break the back of the lecture and get into my stride.

7.30 pm. My other life: the Holy Trinity Church Committee meeting.