8.15 am. A lazy wake. 9.00 am. The conspectus project beckoned, mercilessly. A return to reading and the thorny issues surrounding visual culture’s content and field of competence, and also its threat to traditional art-historical values. More mundanely, a recent courier delivery arrived with damage to the container and, thereby, to the content. The base was damp, ripped away in part (because the cardboard had become sodden), and had a gash traversing its width, which had penetrated through to the underside interior:

I threw the problem back in the direction of the supplier: ‘You sort it out!’. Meanwhile, back at the meatier matters of the Bible [& whatever] … progress was slow and not encouraging. A change of focus beckoned.

1.40 pm. I reviewed section 5, and inserted an extracted central channel from the voice tracks in order to generate a mid-point monaural signal. 2.00 pm. Back into the pit of conspection. If you strain hard and long enough at a problem, something will always yield (including oneself, of course).

If your own ideas fail to emerge, immerse yourself in those of others. Scholarship is there to nourish, as well as to inform and enlighten. To close the afternoon — a little Internet link filing and foldering. When the ‘pending’ folder got too long, I just had to:

5.00 pm. Save and close. 6.30 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. An evening with my wife.