‘Snow on snow’.
Day on day.
Buried deeper,
Without moving;
Without trace.
‘How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift’
withdraws.*

And after the storm, came a gentle whisper: ‘Stay quiet still-longer, friends’. Birdsong returned. Cars moved cautiously. I could hear my heartbeat. The sky opened. A thaw had begun. But the heart grew colder. Renunciation. (Like a hard winter borne.)

8.00 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Back to Pedalboard III. A trussing was in order – that’s to say, neatly bundling and strapping down the cables and joiners underneath. My shiny trousers (which make me look like a biker-boy) are losing their sheen:

11.00 am: All three boards were tested and optimised. I found this to be an immensely satisfying task. Back to the ‘Men as Trees, Walking’ composition. All the parts of the text had, now, been distributed along the spine of the drum track. It remained, at this stage, to micro-adjust the position and length of each sample.

12.45 pm: My ears could no longer hear. Therefore, I set the composition aside and reviewed the turntable samples that I’d generated on Thursday and Friday. After lunch, I continued. There was less useable material in the samples than I’d anticipated. Far too much silliness, obviousness, arbitrariness, and unimaginative modulation. One must attend to the semantics, syntax, and hermeneutics implicit in the narrative. The text should be the principal determinant of its own interpretation. My present approach may not be the right way to go about things.

For over thirty years, I’ve kept an archive of personal memorabilia. The material covers the period from the year I was born to around the mid 1990s. (I really need to sit down, one day, and talk to myself about my reluctance to let go of things.) Every so often, I’ll draw attention to one of those historical artefacts in this diary.  They have no importance in themselves, other than as an embodiment of a memory about someone or something that was important:

In the 1960s and 70s, Mrs Richards ran the school shop/local store from the front room of her terraced house, four doors up from where we lived in Abertillery. When I visited to buy either chocolate bars (usually) or a can of something for my Mam, she’d invariably draw one of ‘Uncle Alf’s pigeons’ on a sweet packet for me. Uncle Alf and Auntie Nance lived next door to my parents. He kept racing pigeons in a cot ‘out the back’. Neither were related to me. In the valleys, all close neighbours were referred to as either uncle or auntie. Whereas all true uncles and aunties were called by their forenames. Mrs Richards was evidently not a trained artist. But I was captivated by the ‘magic’ of the representation taking place in front of me, and the way in which she adapted the image to fit the format of the paper – which was different on every occasion. Her efforts made me want to draw.

5.20 pm: Roger and out!

*For Amy Seed