Yesterday. Postgraduate administrations of the significant kind absorbed my morning. After lunch and through to the evening, I began notating ideas for my notional Bible and sound conference, while setting up the new sound system for the performance-based dimension of ‘The Talking Bible’ project (which I’d conceived last Tuesday) and fielding student references that had to be dispatched pronto.

Today. 8.30 am: Off to School. 8.45 am: The studios have begun to transform, under Mr Garrett’s strategic management, in readiness for the undergraduate and postgraduate exhibitions in a few weeks’ time:

9.00 am: I held a residual Vocational Practice presentation assessment, followed by a Personal Tutor advisory session with one student who needed guidance about choosing their second year modules (which is, often, not as straightforward as it looks on paper).

10.00 am: The first MA Fine Art tutorial of the morning. A number of my charge are exhibiting in the next few weeks. Today’s priority was to determine which works were likely to be hung (which is, often, not as straightforward as it looks on paper, too):

10.50 am: Off to the Old College Land for a further postgraduate tutorial. The perfect light: clear, sharp, saturated:

After lunch, and another module advisory session, I held the day’s third 1-hour MA tutorial. Thereafter, it was back to Old College Land for two further tutorials until the end of the afternoon. The colour of the sea was resplendent. I sensed the ‘presence’ during the course of my tutorials: that experience whereby the tutee’s and tutor’s hearts as well as their minds commune with one another. On such occasions, the boundaries between art and life and persons are transcended. Both participants are held in the thrall of something much larger than either of them. Art is a gentle force.

6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: Myriad minor postgraduate matters to settle. Admin replicates like a virus.

Some principles and observations from today’s engagements:

• If there’s going to be a turn or deviation on the route that you’ve chosen, you’ll alight upon it in time (and at the right time). But, first, you must be sure that you’re on the right path.
• No one has got their act together entirely. We’re all limping and blundering through life, to a greater or lesser extent.
• The gulf between our ideal and our reality may be immense and, in some respects, unbridgeable.
• If you can talk about a work for forty minutes solidly, it must have something going for it.
• The question is not: ‘How can one justify engaging in creative art, but how can you justify not so doing?’ Creativity humanises.