Bank Holiday. 7.30 – 8.00 am: ‘Go!’:

8.15 am: A communion. Over the weekend, I watched Jennifer Brea’s film Unrest. It documents her struggles with acute and chronic ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). The disease has left her largely bedridden and, at times, in despair – feeling as though life has left her behind. As a fellow sufferer (see my blog ‘ME and Me‘), I found her exposition of the condition and its impact on her own life, as well as the lives of others, to be illuminating and moving. Her account was painful to watch; her approach to living with this devilish disease, nothing short of heroic. She experiences short and tantalising periods of wellness and normality – conditions that most of us take for granted most of the time. Like those moments of exquisite happiness and contentment that may come into our life, there’s a price to be paid. For example, a morning’s walk in the sunshine was followed by weeks of exhaustion, muscular distress, and mental chaos.

10.00 am: A consultation about my new super-fast, super-quiet computer build. He knows his stuff; I was in good hands. (And, to think, I used to change his nappies.):

10.30 pm: ‘More tea, please!’ Into the studio and onto the process of mastering. To begin, I sought to establish a unity of loudness across all tracks. I’ve always found this very difficult to do. Automated ‘batch processing’ leaves much to be desired. To my mind, each track has to be tuned manually, by ear. At the outset, on the first pass, I aim to peak the tracks at -3dB. Thereafter, I sweep the tracks from the beginning of the album to the end, tweaking parameters until an acceptable level of commonality is achieved. This would take time and many attempts. 12.30 pm: The first pass was complete.

2.00 pm: Off towards somewhere between Rhydyfelin and and Llanfarian to investigate the area surrounding my new little church, at Llanychaearn.

There’s been a place of worship on the site that the present Llanychaearn Church (rebuilt in 1878) since the Middle Ages. It had been painted by the topographic watercolourist David Cox (1873–1959). The older part of the cemetery is in a state of picturesque decay. Few sounds can be heard above the birdsong and rush of the stream, and the river beyond, that run parallel to the church:

For the remainder of the afternoon I caught up on a few DIY projects, and completed hanging pictures along the upstairs corridor: