I had a fitful night’s sleep. My ’24-hour ambulatory blood-pressure monitor’ — the cuff of which, when inflated, has the grip of a grizzly bear — woke me on the hour, every hour, until I rose. During the monitoring session, the patient must keep an activity diary for every 30 minutes of the day. (Let’s hope that Universities UK don’t catch on to this idea, as a means to ‘help’ academics rationalise their personal timetable.) It’s a sort of salami sliced and desperately un-nuanced autobiography, wherein one’s life can be described only in terms of : ‘working’, ‘walking’, ‘eating’, ‘sleeping’, ‘relaxing’, ‘travelling’, ‘driving’, ‘exercise’, ‘housework’, and ‘watching TV’. (It would appear that this latter state of being is quantifiably different from ‘relaxing’. Surprisingly, ‘sex’ is not included.)

8.30 am: I re-engaged the Art/Sound lecture (while processing Matt. 20.13 sound files in the background) before ‘walking’ to the School of Art, where I conducted an MA application interview (which I categorized as a mode of ‘working’):

Thereafter, I resumed ‘walking’ (or was it ‘travelling’, or, perhaps, ‘exercising’ — given the hill’s steep gradient?), and made my way to the GP surgery to be unshackled from the blood-pressure monitor and relieved of a phial of blood:

On my return home, I carried on with the Art/Sound lecture and sound-file processing (the first and quaternary tasks of the day). I’m ‘digging’ Swing music, as they’d say in the 1940s. I continued in this vein throughout the afternoon, moving forward in music history from Boogie-Woogie to Bebop and Free Jazz.

A piece of my ephemera has become eternal. The New Hart’s Rules: The Oxford Style Guide, second edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) has a reference to one of my Facebook posts:

It’s included to exemplify a standard method for citing this type of publication in an academic text. My post is preceded by an illustration showing the convention for podcast referencing (using one of Grayson Perry’s Reith Lectures as an example), and another instance of a ‘Facebook post/update’, from Barack Obama’s page. I doubt whether I’ll ever again be mentioned on the same page as the President of the United States of America:

6.10 pm: Practise session 1.  7.30 pm: Studio work. The secondary and tertiary tasks of the day were: dismantling Handboards 1-3 (August 25, 2014) while setting up Pedalboard II for a thorough workout over the next few days; and putting equipment back into storage. You must be not only your own technician but also a roadie and studio manager. Discipline always proceeds outwards — from soul to mind to body to instrument to effectors to mixer to amplifier to recorder to studio, and on into the world. By the end of the evening session, Pedalboard II was installed and ready for operational tests on Friday:

9.30 pm: Practise session 2. By 11.00 pm, I was ready to search for the sleep that I’d lost last night.