Sunday, October 13:

Monday, October 14. 7.45 am: I’d given my study a dust, vacuum, and tidy before and after time with our lunchtime guest. This morning, before work, I attended to domestic/personal, paper-based admin and, afterwards, relished the pleasure of confining waste to a real bin. A sound effect no longer accompanies the act of either depositing a file in my desktop ‘bin’ or emptying it. I used to hear a faux-crumpling of paper; it summoned an act of purposeful defiance and devil-may-carelessness: the joy of consigning something unsought and unwanted to irretrievable oblivion:

9.00 am: Once the backlog of emails was, likewise, excised from the inbox, and teaching for the week ahead planned, I returned to Friday’s tasks. By lunchtime, I’d completed all the transcriptions inputs for the first run-through of the website. Then, it was back to the first page for a second appraisal:

After lunch, I started drafting descriptors for each of the tracks. I wanted to say only enough … and no more. I’ve no truck with trying to explain every aspect of a composition. In any case, the artworks are, at some level, incomprehensible to me. They shouldn’t be demystified. Creativity is not an entirely rational practice. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the artistic endeavour is the pursuit of that elusive understanding that they withhold, teasingly. Finding isn’t guaranteed. Years later, you may reap from your work more than had been sown (the interest on the capital). In so doing, you’ll also discover something about yourself that was equally impenetrable, back then.

7.30 pm: I returned to admin mode to complete financial returns on two research projects, respond to the day’s incoming mail, and take a peek over the parapet of future projects.

Natural elements: