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Is it not ironic that the bronze-cast statues of slave owners all have a dark-brown complexion. WFH: DAY 70. 7.30 am: A communion. 8.00 am: A review of the day ahead and tomorrow’s engagements. There was still much to do administratively. However, now was the time to also begin reclaiming some of the Summer period for my own work, and…

There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother (Proverbs 18.24). WFH: DAY 67. 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Email roundup. With the undergraduate and taught-course postgraduate marking complete and awaiting ratification at the exam board meeting, only the research postgraduates, and their blessed monitoring round, remained ahead of me. The admin structure for that was now in place. One…

WFH: DAY 65. I engaged a full day of administrations centred on finalisation of undergraduate Exhibition marks. Ordinarily, all staff engaged in delivering this module would walk around the studios, where the students’ work is hanged, moderating each other’s marks and ensuring comparability of assessment across all mediums. The exercise takes an age. But, by the end, we can all…

WFH: DAY 64. 5.30 am: I could sleep no longer. The birds had begun their dawn chorus two hours earlier. For the reminder of the morning I was, in my head, one hour ahead of true time. 7.00 am: A communion. 8.00 am: I remembered a detail from a landscape: At first sight, the instinct was to caress. I let…

‘There is a world elsewhere’ (Coriolanus) WFH: DAY 63. 7.30 am: Breakfast: 8.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am: The morning was set aside for odds and sods, marking extension submissions, coordinating marking validation meetings, holding conference meetings, setting up a review structure for MA applications, procurement, and replying to academic business on social media. (In the background: Cherubini’s Requiem in…

WFH: DAY 62. Now let me tell you about yesterday. It was, more or less, the last day for finalising my module marks, uploading comments, agreeing decisions with second markers, overseeing student submissions, and deepening my knowledge of upload-portal-logic. The Lion’s share of the work was now behind me. In the evening, I returned to my sound work and considered…

WFH: DAY 60. 8.00 am: A communion. The clock is ticking. Deadlines approach. 9.00 am: Back to report writing. These would be completed by the end of the afternoon, at the latest. In the background: BBC Radio 3’s Chorale Evensong from Tewkesbury Abbey in May 2014. There used to be a good ‘chippy’ in Tewkesbury. When I was a child,…