8.00 am. A number of minor adjustments to teaching appointments over the next few days needed to be made. 8.25 am. On with BA art history dissertation marking for the next two hours:

In the background, I continue processing the source recording of the engraving, stretching the low shelf, high shelf, and rhythmic re-equalisations that I produced last night to exactly 40-minutes’ duration (one minute for every day Moses spent on Mount Sinai, where he received the Ten Commandments from God).

10.45 am. A walk to the School. The air is still cool, but I can feel sun’s warmth on my skin. The sunlight is sharp (and brings out the saturation of primary colours, especially); the shadows, dark and defined like ink stains:

At the School, on the stairs, on the way to a tutorial — an apparition shimmers like an aspen tree:

11.00 am. A PhD Fine Art tutorial with Eileen Harrisson:

We discussed those pockets of resistance, that are still encountered in the gallery world, to the idea of stitch as a bona fide mode of fine art practice; analogies between paint-based and stitch-based materials and procedures; the tradition of the pictorial stitching and wool work; the tradition of history painting on the grand scale, and its adaptability to stitch; and stitch’s own adaptability as a medium for interpreting scenes of atrocity taken from the period of ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland (1968-98).

1.30 pm. Following lunch, I returned to dissertation marking and to sound processing (in the background). 5.15 pm. Two scripts down. Two to go. The sound files are now ready for processing. 6.20 pm. Practise session 1: chordal pattern changes.

7.20 pm. I needed to prepare the script for Thursday’s Chapels in Wales class. This will be the first (and possibly only) lecture that I’ll ever give without the aid of a PowerPoint. The subject is the core of my edition of:

The book contains accounts (‘relations’) of encounters with spirits. The visual, and sometimes auditory, phenomena are converted into text. For this reason, in my relation of those accounts tomorrow, I’ll evoke the images and sounds of ghosts, demons, fairies, and witches using only words.

7.45 pm. More ‘dissing’, while assembling sound files into a track session in the background. (I began preparing 20-minute versions of the source files.) It’s so much easier (and enjoyable) to mark the work of a colleague’s dissertation student than that of one’s own. You read your own students’ works from the feet of clay up, and against the backdrop of the struggle, the revisions, the anxiety, and, finally, the measure of conquest. For this reason, among many, I’m grateful for the balanced perspective and assurance of fairness afforded by double-marking in this an every other dimension of the School’s assessment process.