5.30 am. A waking dream: Vienna, under a warm and consoling sunlight. Out of sight, one man said to another: ‘I was here in ’48’. ‘You were here in ’98’, the second remonstrated. Then, a slow moving tram wound towards, and passed straight through, me. In that moment, I was transported to a polling station that I’d visited at St Ives on June 23:

8.30 am. Real world. Today’s primary task was to complete the album details (track listing, equipment and source manifests, and acknowledgements). While not heady work, it does require a fair degree of concentration. The devil is in the detail, and demons of omission, inconsistency, and disorder live there with him.

Twenty-nine years ago today, my mother passed away. I’ve now lost her for longer than I knew her. She was entirely remarkable, in that quiet way characteristic of many South Walian working-class women of her generation. Mam was resourceful, hard working, highly organised, efficient, a clear communicator, clever, shrewd, uncannily wise, loyal, caring beyond measure, and a good team player.  As a consequence, she was much sought after as an administrator, secretary, friend, and confidant. She also had a wicked sense of fun, to which my Dad and I succumbed, often. The best in me owes the most to her:

But she had no ‘eye’ whatsoever. Mam couldn’t draw for toffee, and her capacity to decapitate, or otherwise obscure, the subject of her photographs was legendary in our family:

After lunch, I continued to assemble varieties of source references (of which there are many) for the album, while playing ping-pong with emails sent to and from the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, initiating the Welsh translation of the text, and endeavouring to determine who was responsible for generating the album’s catalogue number: the Archive or record company. (Oh hum!) I wrote the company a letter containing queries-a-plenty and my proposed diary of interim deadlines.

Evening. The Peoples’ Collection of Wales had kindly given me a high-resolution copy of one of the over 2,000 slides of the Port Talbot Steel Works. The process of analysing the digital image using mammographic scanning techniques, developed by Professor Reyer Zwiggelaar, can now begin:

Detail: Port Talbot Steel Works, glass slide (c.1906) digital rendering, pcw003_00001 (courtesy of the Peoples’ Collection of wales)

Having moved from the amber to the green light on this project, I prepared for the initial tests and discussions with the folk in Computer Science.