8.00 am: A communion. I don’t presume: ‘For thou knowest not what a day may bring forth’. Therefore:

8.30 am: I had to travel to School by the alternative route, which involved power-walking uphill. I should alter my established habit more often. (Routinely breaking with routine, as it were.):

9.00 am: A tutorial cancellation gave me space for admin catch-up. (Do I ever actually catch-up?) As a young child, I used to have a nightmare in which I’d chase my mother up the hill of the terrace where we lived. The closer I got to her, the further she moved away from me (oblivious to my pursuit.) The dream has recurred in adult life.

9.30 am: As a tutor to young adults, I cannot leave the parent in me outside the studio doors. T: ‘Get some breakfast down you before coming to class! Go to bed earlier, and get up earlier! You’ll get a cold in your kidneys, wearing that!’ (Those kind of things.) S: ‘I sacked the work’. T: ‘What?’ [Sacked = rejected.] Being the older generation involves a linguistic learning curve.  T: ‘Glaciers are the colour of a frozen raspberry Slush Puppy’, I said, with due gravitas. I sensed that there ought to be more forward momentum in the studio than there was, presently. The final exhibition looms:

12.00 pm: A lunchtime consultation at the Town Committee Chambers before returning to the mothership for first year personal tutorials. I can’t/won’t compel them to turn up for appointments. But, at the same time, I don’t assume that they’re ok just because they don’t attend. (Silence and absence can be ambiguous.) Some, I’ll seek out like a Hound of the Baskerville.

3.00 pm: Homebase, and the finalisation of the week’s admin, and preparations for the week of teaching ahead. I cleared the decks, so that I could return to composition this evening.

7.30 pm: I returned to yesterday’s ruminations upon the relationship between sound and writing. There’s a verse from Habakkuk, one of the minor prophets in the Old Testament, which I’d previously dealt with, visually (and rather modestly), in the project Seal Up the Vision and Prophecy, The Pictorial Bible II (2007). It reads: ‘And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it’ (Hab. 2.2). The text neatly fuses visualisation and inscription – concepts that have recurred throughout my work, periodically, ever since. The tables mentioned in the verse probably referred to clay tablets. In the context of my current practice, they’ll reference the tables that turn the records on my decks. As I tossed and turned, struggling to get to sleep in the early hours of this morning, I considered recording myself writing out the vision on paper with a pencil. The captured sound would, thereafter, be commercially engraved on a pair of vinyl records and made ready for manipulation. And, so, the idea moved one step forward … to good knows where.

From my archive of memorabilia: Letts Schoolboys Diary 1971:

This was the only diary I’d kept, until 1982. And this was its last entry. Evidently, perseverance was not one of my strong points back then. The days leading up to 17 January revealed a 12-year old boy who was disenfranchised from education, semi-illiterate, lazy, selfish, pleasure-seeking, preoccupied with pocket money, and obsessively grieving the end of the Christmas holidays. Once I hit puberty and my teens, things got considerably worse. Thus, 1971 marked the beginning of a five-year, and a fairly comprehensive, decline. Like the Prodigal Son, I needed to be brought to my wits end before coming to my senses.

Some principles and observations derived from yesterday’s and today’s engagements:

• When we’re older, we make the friends that we want and need, and the friends that want and need us in return.
• The dialogue between conception and realisation is like the dance of binary stars.
• What do you expect your audience to apprehend in the work, and how have you ensured that they will?
• T: ‘What constitutes resolution in terms of the problem that you’ve set for yourself?’
• Fixations and obsessions can be turned into positive attributes: like the capacity to focus hard and long, and the power of unwavering commitment.
• Idea: painting as meditation and prayer.
• There’s a world of difference between scepticism and circumspection.
• Its a PhD. But only a PhD. Your life is far more important. Retain your perspective.
• The final undergraduate exhibition – an ideal: continuity and diversity in equilibrium.
• An epiphany in respect to one work will have implications for them all.
• We are prone to give up at the end of the race, in sight of the finishing line, rather than we are at the beginning.
• Life can appear so utterly indecipherable and obtuse, sometimes.