9.30 am. Pulled myself out of bed, limb by limb, tingling and aching from top to toe. 10.15 am. I’ve determined that this will be a productive convalescence. With a Belmont Loose Leaf File on my lap, I sat in my armchair by the bedroom window, looking out over the neighbouring gardens (As a matter of principle, one ought to take time to watch the passage of clouds and the progress of shadows.) More than reasonable ideas often occur to me when I’m poorly. Perhaps things appear clearer the closer one approaches delirium. (This is not a hypothesis I wish to test often.)

Recently, the vague notion of a soundscape based upon the industry and landscape of South Wales has drawn my attention. My commitment to the study of these subjects has been dormant for a number of years. Therefore, the insistence of this idea has surprised me. I’ve not sought it; it has found me. And, I’ve learned to always answer a knock on the door. So …

In between bouts of dosing, I set my mind to consider sounds that I associate with my boyhood in Blaina. During the school holidays in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I spent Tuesday and Thursday of every week there at my grandparents’ home. My grandfather, Oliver Rees (centre, below), was Overman at Beynon’s Colliery, situated close-by:

He was my passport to most every area of the pit, including the canary aviary, the pony paddock, and, best of all, the electricians’ workshop. It smelt of scorched-grease, copper, and sweat, and was filled with heavy rubber-insulated cables that sprawled like sleeping anacondas across the floor, spring-loaded push-buttons the size of a man’s palm, and large, oily ball-bearings stacked like doughnuts. In the afternoon, I’d play on the grassed-over tips that overlooked the colliery, while listening very deliberately to its sonorities:

In my Belmont Loose Leaf File notes, I recalled:

for me, the significance of landscape is principally that of a place where I’ve either live or come from (the sense of home) / returning to and representing the SW industrial landscape in sound only — a sonic painting (?) / remember the noises of the pit: high-pressure steam escaping; deep-toned hooters; whistles with an unwavering pitch; the clank of a train of coal trucks as it were pulled taut and out of the colliery by a steam engine; a hammer beating on a metal sheet (always far off); the vibration of coal-laden lorries on the main road; the crank of a changing gear; the squawk of crows and the chatter of starlings / quiet landscapes elsewhere were barren of event — incomplete / how have these sounds been recorded in the literature of the SW coal industry? / do sounds have their ruins? / is a sonic archaeology possible? / what sounds from that period have been recorded? (the audiographic photograph) / how does one capture what can no longer be heard? / an aural history (listened to), rather than an oral history (spoken about).

1.40 pm. After lunch, and following bed rest, I digitized, excised, enlarged, and enhanced sections of the far and near distance of family photographs depicting the tips on which I’d sat and listened as a boy. The source is several B-size prints of ‘snaps’ taken of my mother and her friends in Blaina, on ‘the moss’ — a grassed-over tip above my grandparents’ house — in 1947. To me, these fragments are as extraordinary as any deep-space image of a distant galaxy; in some respects, the reality that gave rise to them is just as remote and unreachable. These incidentals are, here, converted into the primary content of the image:

They are aspects of the landscape that were included in the photograph only because they were there:

Doubtless, the photographer was oblivious to them at the moment the shutter opened:

A section of the thin, parched grass at my mother’s feet, just as I would experience it twenty years later, and remember it today:

7.30 pm. Rest and reckoning.