8.00 am: A communion. Over the next few days, I’ll be finalising teaching, admin, and research before the beginning of my vacation. There’re meetings to be had, problems to resolve, actions to be taken, and results to be communicated. Tomorrow’s entry will be the last for several weeks. 9.30 am: I had my first hearing test since I was a baby:
Inevitably, as one gets older, a audition of the full range of frequencies gradually diminishes. My mild and occasional background tinnitus has impaired the upper-most frequencies at little. The lower frequencies remain intact. Mercifully, both ears are effected in the same way. This is good news when it comes to mixing sound across a stereo field, where a precise awareness of left and right balance is essential. The condition may not get any worse. If this is as bad as it gets, I’m laughing:
11.00 am: My website-aid gave me a driving lesson around the controls of the new website template, as well as of those undergirding the transformed John Harvey: Intersections of Sound, Image, Word, and Life blog site, and the soon to be initiated new diary site. The July edition of the Aberystwyth Ego was out, and included an account of my work at Bethel Baptist Church last November:
12.00 pm: On with those bits of admin that really did need to be dispatched before I pulled down the shop blinds.
1.45 pm: After lunch, I prepared the release of the MA Vocational Practice feedback in readiness for tomorrow morning. ‘Music maestro, please!’: I’m now on a nostalgia trip listening to early 1980s pop music. At the time, it was a genre that I largely ignored, being a snide and supercilious prog-rocker with large specs who was also anxious to impress a student at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Cardiff. (Subsequently, she became a music teacher, orchestral performer, and reviewer.):
Pop is a far more culturally ambient mode of music than the compositions I listened to. Whether you loved or loathed it, the sounds were in and on the air. It seeped into my consciousness in a way that contemporary ‘mass music’ doesn’t … at all.
3.15 pm: I nearly had kittens. Where did I put the folder with the Vocational Practice feedback forms? How could I’ve lost them? Why is there no indication that they’d ever existed in my backup files? ‘Because they were never digital files in the first place, John’. They’re written on paper, placed in my real-world inbox, on my real-world desk top, ready to be distributed. May was a long time ago. And I forget stuff.
6.30 pm: I paid a visit to one of our ailing senior ladies at the Church. She is 90 years of age and as bright as a button. Very much the mother of the church. In her living room hangs S Curnow Vosper’s Salem (1908). In the homes of an older generation of chapel and church goer, its absence would be conspicuous. The print has become a Welsh icon of sorts. I recall sitting below the window of the chapel depicted in the painting, while being interviewed about the painting by a TV company. Behind the window, a cockerel crowed so loudly and persistently that my contribution to the programme was rendered unusable:
7.45 pm: I looked over, in an unsystematic manner, the pages of the Intersections site that had been commuted to the new template. I’ll need to go through every page to iron-out the creases that’ve been introduced in translation.
