12.45 am: A late night. The room through which the moonlight shone, before I lay me down to sleep:

8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Into the day: light flakes tossed in the air from place to place:

8.45 am: At the School, I took a hot cup of tea in order to prepare myself for the morning’s session of third year painting tutorials. Some of the students living in the ‘off-world colonies’ (anywhere beyond Machynlleth) may be snow bound today.

9.00 am: Off we go. One of the worst and best aspects of the Edward Davies Building (the School of Art) is its enthusiastic heating system. Today, however, it’s a blessing: fierce and intemperate. In the spaces made by legitimate absenteeism, I got up-to-date with postgraduate admin. (It never ends.) Am I developing a tea addiction?

12.30 pm: Done! If I can leave each student confident that they know what needs to be done in the week ahead, then I’m content. Found painting:

12.45 pm: A research consultation lunch with one of my PhD tutees at a local eatery. We developed a campaign of action. 1.45 pm: I returned to homebase, battling with the Siberian wind. I’ve not known it to be so cold in Aberystwyth before. Frosted salt stained the pavement: a rare phenomenon in these parts:

2.00 pm: I caught up with all the correspondence that had fallen into my inbox, like snow from a laden roof.

2.30 pm: ‘Keep up the pace, John!’ Studiology. I manipulated each spoken account of the two blind men stories separately, modifying the outputs through hand modulators. I’m not keen to over-process the source material. There are several reasons for this. First, because there needs to be a rationale in the text for changing the sonorities of the spoken word; secondly, all types of modulation evoke significances and associations, and not all accord with, or are relevant to interpreting, the meaning of the text; and, thirdly, the sonic characteristics of the source material are often sufficiently engaging in their native state, if presented imaginatively. Economy in all things.

I opened the ‘Men as Trees, Walking’ composition again. To date, I’d not done more than slice-up the relatively short text into sections. To it I added, what I call, my Purcellesque drum track. Immediately something began to gel. Something to push forward tomorrow.

7.15 pm: Following a period of pastoral correspondence, I switched on some of my guitar hardware: Pedalboard I and the Yamaha THR100H Dual amp. I felt the need of a more physical engagement with sound and equipment. My volume pedal had failed.

Some principles and observations derived from today’s engagements:

• What justification do you have for abandoning a project?
• The work that you’ll undertake for the coming exhibition should be: a) a declaration of your full potential; b) doable in the time that remains; c) resolvable at the highest level you can achieve; d) coherent in its intent; and e) clear in its realisation.
• Consider the matter of quantity in terms of not the number of works that you need to produce but, rather, the number of hours that you need to invest in each of the works.
• By the time you’re thirty, you’ll have finished building the house that is you. Thereafter, its just a matter of adding extensions, knocking down partition walls, putting in more and larger windows, sealing up some doorways, and replacing lost and broken tiles.
• A student may have facility but no trajectory.
• We may begin a work in ignorance but develop cognisance of our intent as it proceeds. (Meaning rises to meet us.)
• It’s what the painting requires, and not what either the subject suggests or you desire, that’s most important.
• As in life, sometimes you need to paint over (paint out) a problematic area in order to create a fresh foundation on which a better solution can be rendered.