8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Alarm! Due to a confusion over the times for the Postgraduate Monitoring Committee today, a meeting that I’d assumed would take place at 2.00 pm was about to convene in half-an-hour. I downed my tea, gathered my belongings, and made a dashed up the long, steep hill towards the main campus and the Huw Owen Building. I arrived with time to spare. Good exercise!:

This was a confirmatory meeting only, sealing the deal on reports submitted for the August committee and, therefore, mercifully short. I was back at my desk with a fresh cup of tea in hand by 10.15 am, readied to proceed with thesis examination, nail incoming email, and add to my diary commitments to further meetings next week:

1.00 pm: Following an early lunch, I headed for the School to assistant one of my contingent with their hanging, and another shepherd’s sheep with their sound installation. There’s something rather ‘manly’ about wielding an electrical screwdriver and a spirit-level, measuring, and levering. Painting fuses the physical, intellectual, and emotional aspects of our humanity in a very satisfying way:

Manual work is intrinsically virtuous – an estimation celebrated in Ford Madox Brown’s masterpiece Work (1852-65). Culturally, we abandoned this principle after the digital revolution. Today, most people lift little more than their fingers off a keyboard. My father (far left in the photograph) was a factory employee. He worked for Dunlop Semtex, Brynmawr, Monmouthshire, as a colourant mixer, preparing pigments for rubber floor tiles. To me, he was the ‘noble labourer’:

Dad’s factory was the first example of modern architecture that I’d ever encountered. And a very good one at that. During my five years of my education at Nantyglo Comprehensive School (which was, in contrast, an unspeakably woeful example of modern architecture), I would often pass the factory at lunchtime on my way to the fish and chip shop in Brynmawr. The vaulted boiler house (below) stole my heart. I’ve sometimes wondered what influence its gridded lattice, confident geometries, and truth to materials aesthetic had on my later predilection for abstraction:

2.30 pm: Back at homebase, I drilled deeper into the thesis for the remainder of the afternoon. In the background, I played John McLaughlin and Shakti (1975), which I first heard when seventeen years of age. Then, at the conclusion of the opening track, ‘Joy’, I cried – overwhelmed by the joy, beauty, spiritual energy, and accomplishment of both the music and musicianship.

7.30 pm: The last lap of the second reading. My opinion regarding the work’s worth is now settled. An initial pre-viva report will be required. An internal examiner will prepare the same. Thereafter, we’ll, together, draw up a plan of action in terms of questions to be asked, areas to be investigated, virtues to be highlighted, and apparent weaknesses to be interrogated.