9.10 am. A stroll to this week’s Farmers’ Mini-Market — a scaled-down version of the fortnightly fayre. On walking to Lidl, I set myself an exercise: Purchase the first 78-rpm record you alight upon, and make something from it. Craft had none; The Furniture Cave, only a small number to hand.  The assistant pulled out a dusty pile from underneath a table. As he did, the upmost record slid off and broke into three large pieces on impact with the stone floor. (I’ve met with this scenario before. The Evan Roberts wax cylinder, on which my R R B V E Ǝ T N Ƨ O A is based, met with a similar fate after it had been rediscovered.)  In terms of my intent, the shattered disc represented the first that I alighted upon. (Sometimes the artefact self-selects.) Once established, the rules of the game must be adhered to — no matter how inconvenient that may turn out to be. The record was still in its paper sleeve, so all the pieces were contained. Now, here’s the intriguing part: the title of the song on the B side is My Heart is Broken in Three. This is a gift. One must always honour such fortuitous coincidences:

The 10 inch disc, released in 1956, is on the London American Recordings, a subsidiary of London Records, which was a branch of Decca Records:

The artiste, Slim Whitman, was a popular folk and country singer, also renowned for his yodelling. My instinct is not glue the record back together, but, rather, to explore the artefact in its fractured state. (Broken things beckon to me.) This is something which I was unable to do — in a physical (as distinct from a digital) sense — with the wax cylinder.

2.00 pm. Housework beckoned too: bathroom, linen room, floors, surfaces, chrome, mirrors, dusting, mopping, vacuuming, scrubbing, etc. I cleansed the way:

4.00 pm.  Cold places, like cold people, are often avoided. Great resolve was required to confront the guck and residue that had accumulated inside the fridge. Which member of the family thought that they could cryogenically suspend left-over potatoes? I spruced up the door a treat; the interior is a job for the morrow:

5.20 pm. Clocked out.