8.00 am. An early start, making a final review of a draft chapter submissions for a PhD Art History thesis before my first MA tutorial of the day. I’m now working with two computer screens in my office (just as I do at home). It’s a small addition to the working environment, but one that levers considerable benefits. The arrangement facilitates multi-tasking, clearer thinking, and an unimpeded movement between tasks and projects:

A ‘screen’ of an altogether different order: I’m so grateful that my office doesn’t look out upon another building, staring back. Instead, I’ve a view of the Irish Sea and the harbour lighthouse, and I hear birdsong. The robins have returned:

10.00 am. An MA Fine Art tutorial. I stressed the necessity to:

• document the process and outcome;
• ruminate in writing;
• explore all of the project’s implicit variables;
• take responsibility for every dimension of an artwork’s process and production;
• define, develop, and defend the discipline peculiar to the practice;
• persist (even apparently simple propositions can make significant demands on our time, energy, and attention).

10.45 am. PhD Fine Art tutorial. Further principles emerged:

• Do that which you alone can do;
• Do that which your life’s experience, temperament, personality, and understanding and awareness equip and prepare you to do;
• Abandon what is good for what is best;
• Respond to change when it forces itself upon you;
• ‘Remember Lot’s wife’: she looked back and became permanently immobilised.

12.00 pm. I cleared a backlog of teaching and pastoral admin. I’ve considerable doubts about SAMS’s (our register system) ability to collate, compound, and interpret individual module data with any accuracy. It’s throwing up ‘sinners’ who are known ‘saints’ — perfectly reasonable attendees.

1.30 pm. Marked-up a third of tomorrow’s Art/Sound lecture text, and then turned to research admin and the publicity for the R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A CD release and The Bible in Translation exhibition.

6.15 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. In the evening I prepared a worksheet and materials for tomorrow’s demonstration on how prime board:

Priming is, first, a philosophical and ethical enterprise. On one level, it’s a metaphor and paradigm for, variously: laying down a solid foundation, preparedness, a sound beginning as the basis of sound progress, care for fundamental things, and for things that ultimately no one will ever see once they are worked upon. What a person does in secret is the true measure of their integrity.

9.40 pm. Practise session 2. 10.30 pm. ‘The night watch’. I compressed two PowerPoints on colour and mixing into one magnum lecture/demonstration, which I’ll deliver to the second and third year painters in the next few weeks.