8.30 am. I cleared the backlog of emails that had accrued during my weekend away from the desk, and worked out my timetable for engaging the first few hours on the day and dealing with those matters that were screaming for immediate attention.

Over the weekend, I’d visited the Trafford Centre, Manchester:

This is a shopping mall overlaid by, what can only be described as, architectural pornography-cum-bling: crass, sensually vulgar, unfulfilling, exploitative, and manipulative; a mélange of Vegas, theme park and film lot. It’s what might be called, if it hasn’t already been called, Mannerist Postmodernism. Unlike authentic Postmodernism, which knowingly and purposefully alludes to and quotes from previous styles and movements, the Centre references Postmodernism itself. But it does so in an obvious, cack-handed, and trite, rather than in a clever, clever, post-Postmodern, way. Insufficiently intelligent to be either cynical or critical, the architecture is a cheat that betrays both customers and custom. Enough rant.

11.00 pm. Having begun and completed a long overdue peer review of a biblical reception article (How did I overlook that?), I organised the remainder of the working day, upgrading my ‘news’ section of the website and outlining several major research projects that need to proceed in parallel over the next year or so: The Pictorial Bible III/The Aural Bible I: The Bible in Translation exhibition; ‘An indexical-interpretive scope of sound documents at the National Screen & Sound Archive of Wales’, and the ‘Sound & Something Else’ conference. In the background, I continued processing sound files for the multi-worded Matt. 20.23:

After lunch, I continued with the late-morning’s work before focussing upon the performance element, ‘New Songs’, of The Aural Bible II.  One’s weaker instinct would advocate marching forward with specific artworks rather than pausing to survey the field before the battle. The former sense of imperative has little to do with intelligent strategy and everything to do with an overbearing stress that sees only the on-coming enemy of deadlines through the binoculars. My approach has always been to consider, consider, consider … then, act.

6.10 pm. Practise session 1. In the evening, I made final preparations to tomorrow’s Art/Sound lecture and began work on the PowerPoint of the Workshop 1 session.

Exhaustion!