I must have been awake for hours, waking on the hour, every hour, for what felt like a very long time. Morning could not come soon enough. 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: I’d spent yesterday evening reassembling the computer and electrical gear and dusting in my study, following the visit of Wil ‘the carpet’ and Tomos ap Wil ‘the carpet’ (below):

8.30 pm: A Hoovering. New carpets shed wool like an animal. I began to reinstall all that that had been removed from the room. I was resigned to the prospect that this would be a bitty kind of day, full of necessary disruptions that I’d have to recover from immediately. I’d needed pocket-sized research tasks to match the rhythm.

11.00 am: Studiology. I mentioned to my PhD fine art tutee yesterday that I’d repurchased a record that had been in my collection (and lost, subsequently) back in the early 1970s. It taught novices to stereophonica how to set up their turntables correctly. The album includes a track called ‘Silent Grooves’ (a resonant title if ever there was one), designed to test the presence of hum and rubble emanating from the decks’ motor and drive. The track has nothing recorded on it. It’s a curiously Cagean scenario. Each person who played their copy of the record heard something unique: the noises peculiar to their equipment, overlaid upon the spit and bind of the grooves particular to their copy. All that one can hear is the sound of the medium and the means of mediation. Wonderful! Had Decca the copyright upon this recording of silence?, I wondered:

11.15 am: I returned to loudness mastering. 11.45 am: Off to the School, via the egg retailer, to interview a late-applicant for the BA programme. The clouds darkened the sky:

But no cloud burst. A no-show from the applicant. I busied myself upstairs, walking the studio floors in a somewhat proprietorial manner, scanning the whiteness, cheering on the troops, and nodding approvingly:

1.20 pm: I was ‘an hungered’– as the King James Version of the Bible expresses it – and returned home. An almost liquid Brie graced my side-plate. ‘Too much to bear!’ The sun had burst upon the town again. 2.00 pm: Back to the loudness mastering. I imported the adjusted tracks into my Bandcamp account to, again, hear them in sequence as though they were the album proper. While tracks were being uploaded, I continued to ready my study. I began with those compositions dealing with blindness and healing:

Only by playing the tracks over and over will the the median loudest be discerned. 4.45 pm: A guest arrives. She had brought a tea cosy as a gift. 6.00 pm: dinner and washing-up:

7.30 pm: I aimed to have all the tracks uploaded by the close of the evening, so that I’d be able to listen to the whole album while marking tomorrow.