8.15 am. Exhibition boot up and admin mop-up. 9.00 am. Once I’d organised Stephen Hughes to deliver the Chapels in Wales lecture, I commenced the first of the day’s tutorials with a ‘drippy’ (in the best sense of the word) MA painter. The full-time Masters and the third year fine art students are moving towards that period where hard and definite decisions, commitments, and determinations have to be resolved and put into action. Under pressure, it’s too easy to make the wrong choice, underestimate the amount of time available, and overestimate one’s capacity to deliver on promises. Caution, the counsel of many, and courage are required.

10.10 am. Running late, I gave a ‘shorty’ tutorial with a second MA Fine Art student who’s making inroads with incisions. Afterwards, I returned to BA level to deal with essay and project work queries, and a student making a brave move towards image/sound codifications. Later, I uploaded material to Blackboard, corresponded with postgraduates, and eased emails into ‘sent’. A routine sort of morning, all in all.

Tree denuding continues on my road. The site residue looks like the scene of a crime:

2.00 pm. Following lunch and a battle to remove a confectionary that had got stuck in the automatic dispenser (later, cunningly extracted by our able porter), I had a productive tutorial with Tracy, one of my PhD fine art tutees. She’s moving into fascinating and unchartered territory:

3.00 pm. Further BA fine art tutorials for those who, for good reason, could not attend either last or this Thursday’s sessions.  4.15 pm. Further admin until the end of afternoon.

6.20 pm Practise session 1: sustaining notes with the aid of a compressor pedal. 7.20 pm. I returned to the scope report. This is one of life’s dull but mandatory requirements — the treadmill of accountability. It must be completed by the end of the week. (The deadline is my own, but binding nonetheless.)

…

My father died suddenly at his home in Abertillery sometime after 10 o’clock on this day in 1991. At the time, I was in Aberystwyth watching a drama about ghosts when, unexpectedly, the TV signal was immersed in static and high-pitched feedback howled from the speaker. The device had never behaved like that either before or subsequently. The coincidence was striking and inexplicable. He was 62 year olds, and had survived my mother by only three years. (She died at 60 years of age.)

Dad was a gentleman in every sense of that word: courteous, mild mannered, but strong in opinion. He was conscripted into the army towards the end of the Second World War, where he served as a chef:

On being demobbed, he trained as a mechanic and drove buses between garages at Abertillery and Llanhilleth. Oddly, he never learned to drive a car. (I inherited his pedestrianism.) After he married, Dad became a factory worker, first in ICI Fibres, Pontypool and, thereafter, at Dunlop Semtex, Brynmawr as a ‘colourman’ overseeing the pigmentation of rubber-based tiles.

One of his greatest pleasures was the shed at the bottom of our garden:

It was his bolthole. In the summertime, he’d disappear from the house for hours to repair electrical goods and make useful things out of wood and aluminium. It was there, when I was six years old, that he built for me a large and robust ‘Yankee fort’, as he called it, out of hardboard and balsa wood held together with nails and Bostik. My friends had not seen the like of it. And I have not seen the like of him again.