8.15 am: A communion. 8.45 am: I almost daren’t look in my inbox these days. Bothersome mail slowed my progress into the day. 9.30 am: Finally! Finally! I resurrected the ‘Os and 1s’ of my text for the ‘Noisome Spirits’ text. Presently, it makes more sense in its binary state. Alongside this, over the next few weeks, I’d need to develop the composition entitled ‘There was Such a Noise as if All About was Going to Pieces’ and learn to operate a new sampler launcher. My identities as Welsh historian, historian of the supernatural, and sound-artist conflated for the first time. I’m up for doing either new things or old things in new ways.

11.00 am: An uncharacteristic lapse in self-discipline: toast and tea … and at this time of the day too:

Inevitably, requests and queries related to past and future research projects seeped in around the sides of my immediate activities. However, one commission required me to venture into the archive and fetch out my box-file related my book on Edmund Jones. Within were photocopies of period maps related to Wales. Originally, I’d used them to locate the sites at which witnesses claimed to have experienced spirits. Presently, they’ll provide several PowerPoint illustrations to help vivify the contexts of the supernatural auditions to which Jones referred:

After lunch, I centred my attention on developing the papers for my presentations in March and April. I’m looking forward to designing the PowerPoint. On this occasion, it’ll have to serve both the Aberystwyth and London gigs. My first paper on the Edmund Jones book was delivered at a Medieval and Early-Modern conference held at Siena College, Loudonville, New York State, in October 2002 – aided by slide-transparencies, still:

I returned exactly a year later to deliver a paper on the influence of apparitional iconography in Medieval art on spirit photography. I doubt that I shall ever have the occasion to revisit again:

I wonder what the other delegates went on to do? Some were independent scholars who were having a hard time making ends meet.

5.00 pm: Having completed a first draft of the paper’s introduction, I re-opened my notes on the apparitional account upon which the sound composition will be based. 5.20 pm: Dinner preparations. Dark clouds had begun to gather:

7.00 am: On with the apparitional account. (In the background: Petula Clark’s The Classic Collection. These songs made a significant contribution to the sonic backdrop of my pre-teen years.)

A reflection upon three enjoinings and one place: