There’s a shadow runnin’ through my days / Like a beggar goin’ from door to door (Neil Young, ‘Man Needs a Maid’, Harvest (1972).)

Friday, January 15. WFH: DAY 5. 6.45 am:

7.30 am: I needed to make an early start on assessing in order to have time for a day on the REF PowerPoint material and a departmental conference-call with the Vice Chancellor. On, then, with the Research and Process in Practice submissions. The first light of morning:

I’m aware of sitting in the same position for far too long during the day without intermittent stretching exercises. Yesterday’s busyness had precluded that day’s medicinal ambulation. Self-care must always be a priority. 10.30 pm: Job done! I moved on to REF PowerPoint construction, once again. Having to take up only to put down projects, due to the present competing priorities, slows down progress and corrupts concentration. Ideally, one ought to be able to focus one’s energies, heart, spirit, and mind, and lose oneself in the job at hand. But, needs must. 11.00 am: A meeting with the Vice Chancellor:

12.30 pm: End of conversation. I took a walk around the municipal cemetery before lunch:

1.30 pm: For the remainder of the day, I dug-into my PowerPoint compositions.

Saturday, January 16. WFM: DAY 6. In the dream, I was handed an open and sturdy brown-paper bag filled to the brim with seeds. ‘From these, cotton will grow, with which you must weave a most magnificent white garment!’, spoke the voice. 7.00 am: With that, I awoke to another busy day.

8.00 am: To begin, there were a few more slides to be added to, and a decision to be made regarding the sectional dividers of, the REF PowerPoint for the first CD output. 10.30 am: ‘Eye-gate’ (to quote John Bunyan) was sore from looking; now, it was time for ‘ear-gate’ to work. I returned to mixing. The mixing process is, in one sense, the imposition of a ‘style’ of arrangement. Once it has been established for one track, then, it can be imposed upon all the others, so as to establish a family resemblance that helps to unify different ‘personalities’ of composition. I pared away at the micro-samples — reducing the number of ‘brush marks’, as it were. I’ve still not managed to compose a work dealing directly with ‘the singing in the air’, as it was referred in Wales: a choir of invisible angels heard in either the sky or the rafters of chapels. Jones’s book makes no reference to the phenomenon. However, it undergirds the spirit (in more senses that one) of the whole album. (They’re present.)

Today, I focussed on auditioning the compositions played through near-field monitors and a subwoofer and, thereafter, on headphones:

The voice who lives in my head elbowed me, continually: ‘Don’t fuss much over little!’; ‘Stay your hand where you can!’; ‘Don’t change things just because they’re, now, too familiar to you! They’ll be fresh for those who hear them the first time.’; ‘And don’t give anything any more time than it actually needs, John!’ ‘But do attend to each thing as though everything depended upon it!’ (He’d a knack for stating the blatantly obvious, sometimes.)

1.30 pm: Following lunch, I took a short walk to the cemetery and back. En route, I perceived a subtle change (or, perhaps, a reorientation) either in my spirit, or in the world around me, or else in both. There was a lightening of heart (as when inspired by incipient love); an anticipation of something which had not yet declared itself; and a ‘seeing-through’, to somewhere that’s barely visible and entirely impenetrable.

2.00 pm: Tea in hand, I returned to the desk and played some tracks by Bessie Smith, before taking on the mix again. I re-listened to the morning’s work, comparing one mix with another, and determining what each could learn from the other. 4.30 pm: The afternoon was far spent and the evening, at hand.