The thunderstorm retraced its steps, landward, during the night. Sleep was intermittent as a consequence. 8.15 am. To the School and the, now, routine set up for the Art/Sound lecture. Today, I was taken by surprise. The sound system worked a treat, but several links to images embedded in the PowerPoint presentation had broken (but were fixable in time for the delivery). I suspect that the problem was created during a synchronisation procedure via Google Drive. You’re looking for traffic coming from one direction, and a vehicle hits you from the other.

10.15 pm. The storm at the seafront was ferocious last night, the students tell me. The turbulent tide and high breakers were its only residue. The remainder of the morning and afternoon was devoted to second year painting students, who are working on the ‘sense of place’ project. It appears to be a beguiling simple proposition, until the realisation dawns that we are asking them to paint what cannot be seen. Everyone I taught this morning is approaching a problem, semi-abstractly. (I sense in my bones that abstraction is gradually returning to the centre of visual discourse.) Some lessons, observations, and opinions:

• Students pay inordinate attention to the judgements of their peers.
• Students should listen to the dictates of their own hearts more often.
• ‘Mind maps’ should be outlawed. It’s one of the last vestiges of the A-level mentality that students relinquish. The method encourages prevarication and the illusion of ‘doing something’.
• The student’s zones of confidence and comfort are congruent. To move beyond the boundary of the one is to transgress that of the other.
• Students often want to leap from step A to step E without first working through B, C, and D. These three are the most crucial and demanding phases in the methodological process which, if engaged intelligently, will necessarily determine the outcome of step E. ‘Look after the pennies … ‘, in other words.
• The tyranny of the ‘final work’ is great and cruel.

I’d never before realised that the statues of Messrs Thomas Edward Ellis and Henry Austin, installed at either end of the Quad, are made of plaster rather than metal. (I’m reminded of the metaphor: ‘feet of clay’.). What else in the university is counterfeit?:

2.00 pm. An afternoon of the same. The students at the end of the day confront a tired tutor; nevertheless, they benefit from the distilled fruit of the all my earlier encounters and conversations. I encourage students to make an audio recording their tutorials. Few do, and not consistently. My instinct is that students remember very little of the discussion. Perhaps they recall only what was relevant. But, then again, perhaps they don’t recall all of only what was relevant.

The office/basecamp:

6.00 pm. Practise session 1. In the evening session, Tuesday’s Workshop 1 material was completed and today’s Art/Sound session uploaded (in spite of an achingly slow broadband speed).

9.40 pm. Practise session 2.