Yesterday: I spent the day on the ‘shop floor’, after a fraught two hours of lecturing on the Art/Sound module. The sound system in the lecture theatre had failed. Mercifully, I’d anticipated that inevitability (whenever it would finally arise), and brought into the School my own amplification system as a back up. So images were presented from one computer through PowerPoint, and sounds, from another computer, via the amplifier. (Hairy!) The evening was spent completing the week’s teaching admin and preparing for the week ahead.

Today: 8.00 am: A little tidying of my PowerPoint in readiness for today’s talk on blogging; a little email correspondence; a little dairy updating; and further preparations for the week ahead in teaching and admin. 9.00 am: The meat of the day — I returned to the conference paper and the governing questions (again), and moved on to the topic of hermeneutics.

10.50 am: Off to School to present the ‘Blogging for Beginners’ lecture — a double-act with Mr Iliff:

Ms McKay, who spent some time at the School as a visiting American student two years ago, was in town. She’s been on a European tour. London, Paris, Aberystwyth: the three ‘must sees’ on this side of the Atlantic. We took lunch together at Tree House. Kassie is one of those rarities with whom you can have a conversation that spans across politics, visual art, literature, experience, ethics, food, vocations, and vacations. At her heart is a passion for reading (voraciously) and for savouring each moment, deliberately. ‘Live life intensely, Kassie!’:

1.30 pm: Back at homebase, I sat down, vanquished emails, and typed as one possessed. ‘Write with the urgency of a dying man, John’. Completing this paper will be very hard work. But the last thing I want to feel is that the most difficult tasks, intractable creative problems, and challenging endeavours are behind me. Everest must ever lie ahead.

5.15 pm: Evening:

7.15 pm: After making some adjustments to Pedalboard IV, I settled down to continue the paper. Some times one must write in order to discover, rather than to articulate, ideas. The important thing is just to keep on writing … even if its rubbish. Petula Clark singing Down Town (1965) never fails to lubricate and uplift mind and heart.