9.00 am. To School, for the first of several Open Days during this year’s recruitment round. The weather did not accord with the photographs of the building and its environs as shown in the prospectus. No doubt someone else will pick up on this too:

9.30 am. Bedraggled and dripping visitors began arriving and Tweets to the wider world were posted. In between greeting and conversing with guests (which our exceptional Ambassadors do with aplomb), I dispatched emails and conquered some of my more intimidating admin tasks:

After lunch, the weather began to break:

In the morning and afternoon I had conversations with two intending MA applicants. Such discussions are neither interviews nor interrogations, properly speaking. To my mind, they’re more akin to an encounter at the confessional or on a psychiatrist’s couch. That’s to say, my aim is to direct the applicant to enter into a dialogue with themselves. This is in the hope that they’ll discover the core motive: not only the source of the desire to undertake the degree but also, and more importantly, their internal centre point.

4.20 pm. Homeward and onward with the CD design. The next stage of development is to create its visual identity, which will be manifest in the cover and ‘inner sleeve’ art work, icons, and other furniture. It’s all good fun once the fundamental ‘feel’ of the design is established. This, in turn, must accord with the mood(s) (preferably singular) of the sound pieces on the album. For the R R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A album, the wax cylinder — the object of my inquiry and the theme of the entire composition — dictated the design, to a large extent. The present album has no focal object and a far broader thematic reach. Thus, an encompassing visual identity is, correspondingly, more difficult to establish: