8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 pm: Off to School. A day at odds with my temper. The sun saturated the green leaves and dappled the ground. I recalled Monet’s boulevards. I was out of sorts. (Overcast and drizzling, internally.) 9.00 am: A no-show to begin the day. And tutorial times are precious at this period in the semester. From above my office came the sounds of shunting, bumping, and banging, as Mr Garrett and his team deconstructed the studio and reconstructed it as a space for the coming undergraduate and postgraduate shows.

10.00 am: An MA Fine Art interview. As I’ve said in this dairy before, mature applicants come to this point in their lives as though compelled by an almost mystical sense of inner necessity. Their objective, it would appear, is as much to find themselves as to become an artist. 10.45 am: A tower of emails had grown skyward in my inbox over the Bank Holiday. I began to level them. 11.15 pm: Two pastoral matters, via a message exchange and a face-to-face consultation. My heart sank to hear what some students, through no fault of their own, suffer. I feel inadequate to the task, and keenly aware that I’m neither a trained counsellor nor a medical professional.

12.00 pm: I made preparations for the afternoon’s PhD Art History viva voce, at which I’d serve as Chair. The candidate arrived before time. The proceedings went well. Another successful outcome, on the topic of wood-fired pottery. 2.30 pm: A consultation with one of our secretaries regarding postgraduate applications. I hazard there’ll be around sixteen new members of the MA community come September.

4.00 pm: I climbed up to the postgraduate corridor …

… for an extended tutorial with one of our second-year MA fine art students. We went places, at they say:

as present as absent – on the cusp of materiality and visibility / the ghost of an image / as though it could evaporate, like condensation exhaled upon glass / an image, breathed out / if the works could make a noise, it would be a hum – like a fridge on a hot summer’s day / an image that you have to listen to attentively / small noises – grasshoppers in the long grass / the work that you made forty years ago … it’s there, underneath / our past: as present as absent /

5.15 pm: Homeward:

7.30 pm: An evening re-arranging tutorial appointments and preparing for Wil ‘the carpet’ to lay a new surface on the study floor tomorrow.