8.45 am. Against strong winds and beating raining, I advanced towards the School. 8.55 am. The room for the morning’s fine-art feedback tutorials was readied:

Some principles and observations:

• A student may begin their studies from a position of strength, and end them in weakness. The reverse is also true, and more commonly the case.
• At any one point in your development, you won’t be equally competent in everything, or in every aspect of any one thing. The principle of inconsistency is a constant built into the fabric of reality.
• It’s one thing for a tutor to see the qualities and potential of a student’s work, quite another for the student to do so. We are apt to see our shortcomings with searing intensity, while being wholly oblivious to our strengths. Tutoring is, in part, an endeavour ‘to give sight to the blind’.

11.00 am. Following the last minute cancellation of a consultation meeting at the National Library of Wales, I returned to homebase to write-up my feedback reports and compose a letter to the working group overseeing future research collaborations with the Library. Due to my assessment commitments, I’m unable to attend tomorrow’s inaugural meeting. 12.30 pm. I updated my selection of research outputs for REF. The squall persists, despairingly:

2.00 am. The new sampler/looper has arrived. This’ll fit into the handboard array that I redesigned on Saturday. A test run will be in order at some point during this day’s proceedings:

3.00 pm. I came back to section 1 of ‘Image and Inscription’, in order to review yesterday evening’s modifications. They’d wrought a substantial improvement to the overall cohesion of the 2-minute section. The devil is, indeed, in the detail. The small adjustments, and continued to make today, revealed the compositional logic of the whole — which was not evident (or to which I wasn’t yet attuned) previously.  It’s perhaps strange to talk in terms of rhythm in the context of a sound work that has no time signature or metre. But it’s there … in the pace, in the sonic anticipations, events, and their ebb, and in that fabric of the totality which is apprehended more by feeling rather than by hearing.

6.30 pm. Back into the studio to modify hardware on this occasion. The task was simply satisfying; improvements were immediate. The looper worked a treat. 7.45 pm. An evening at the cinema with the family. My younger son wanted me to see the new Star Wars film. ‘I have a bad feeling about this …’. My grim forebodings weren’t disappointed. I’m no fan.