Summa: diary (December 14-20, 2024)

This has been the year of soul work.
I make so many mistakes.

December 14 (Saturday). 5.30 am: I caught the moon. Outside, the wind blew; but gently, this Saturday.

This would be my final week of work. I’d like to bring several projects to a state of interim resolution, such that they won’t be an up- hill struggle to re-engage after the vacation. The Christmas preparations will proceed in parallel. The close of the year is always a time of reckoning, for me. There’ll be credit and deficit. Some ambitions achieved; some intents either abandoned or still unrealised. Resolute times; times when I walked away prematurely; and times when I should’ve let go sooner.

10.30 am: The Christmas tree arrived. 2.00 pm: Opened, shaken, secured, illuminated, angeled, baubled, ribboned, and beheld.

December 15 (Sunday). The third Sunday in Advent. 9.30 am: An ambulation down Plasgrug Avenue, passed the School of Art above the rise, and stopping on the railway bridge to see the 10.28 pm, Aberystwyth to Shrewsbury train, go by. 11.00 am: Virtual church. 2.00 pm: Further festive embellishments of a tasteless kind around the house.

December 16 (Monday). 7.00 am: Writing. ‘Have you travelled the easier path too often, John?’, the demon whispered accusingly. Demons always speak a partial and recognizable truth. Which is why we listen. Which is why we must outdo them in the harshness of our self-criticism. 8.30 am: A review of the week ahead. This will be one of difficult undertakings and resolves, by design. ‘Thorns and thistles’; mountains and briars.

8.45 am Studiology. A final day on the Aberfan [working title] project until the New Year. Tomorrow, I’ll dismantle the studio workstation so that a builder can have access to the Velux window and, through it, the roof above, to replace tiles that were lost in the recent storm. A review of the two compositions under construction. The suite in its entirety is an extended lament and a requiem. Presently, I can discern nothing other than awfulness and grief in the subject.

11.00 am: A coffee and chill on campus at the Arts Centre with my friend and colleague Dr Dafydd Roberts. We discussed the perils of spontaneous equipment purchases, and the grail of putting together a gigable rig.

1.00 pm: The piano tuner arrived. (He also tunes Rick Wakeman’s concert grands.) 1.30 pm: I rethought the funeral piece from the Aberfan suite, and added samples of a voice talking about the relative silence at the mass interment and the sound of the hymn singing heard from afar. 3.00 pm: I broadened my perspective and researched the pivotal and, in some cases, iconic events that took place in music culture during 1966 — the year of the disaster. For example: Jimi Hendrix arrived in London, and released ‘Hey Joe’; Simon & Garfunkel released The Sounds of Silence; Brian Wilson started to record ‘Good Vibrations’; John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at her art exhibition in London; the Beatles began recording Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; and Iannis Xenakis founded the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales [Centre for Automatic and Mathematical Music], in Paris. Thus, quite apart from the quality and abiding impact of the music made in that year, 1966 signaled a significant development in studio- recording techniques.

December 16 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: Writing. My maternal grandfather (‘Pop’) was Overman at Beynon Colliery, Blaina, Monmouthshire. He was in charge of the workforce, their safety, conditions of work, and productivity. On weekday evenings, colliers would often come to his home, sit on the downstairs settee, still in their overcoats and cap-in-hand (quite literally), and petition him for advice, leverage, and representation on behalf of union members. For his part, he would sit upright in his armchair, staring into the fireplace, gesturing with one hand, while speaking quietly in succinct phrases (peppered with the only swear words he ever deployed: ‘bloody’, ‘ruddy’, and ‘bugger’). Pop was their Don Corleone.

8.30 am: Studiology. A dismantling of the workstation, and (as importantly) a mapping of its cables, sockets, and connections (which are many). At least the various components get a good dusting now. My intent (which is born of expedience rather than laziness) is to unpick as little of the knitting as possible.

I was saddened to hear about the death of Professor J Cheryl Exum recently. She’d been a pioneer in the field of biblical reception theory and a founder of Sheffield Pheonix Press, one of the foremost publishers of scholarship in biblical studies. I’d worked with her in the context of international conferences about the Bible and visual art on a number of occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was Cheryl who’d encouraged me to write The Bible as Visual Culture: when text becomes image, which I published with her press in 2023.

December 18 (Wednesday). 7.00 am: With the studio out of action for the next few days, I worked on study-based projects: the revised book proposal and the guitar rig. (How far are they apart?) A morning proposing. The more I write, the better my understanding. The more I understand, the better my writing. In and out of this endeavour, I reviewed the exemplary website of the Barber Institute of Art, Birmingham, UK. (An idea is percolating.) Rain stopped play, with respect to roof repairs. The builders will return tomorrow (perhaps). 7.30 pm: Guitar rig self-education.

December 19 (Thursday). The wind still blows, and it is cold. 7.00 am: I continued with Christmas preparations. 7.30 am: Studyology. The second proposal revisited. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. The proposal is not either a summary of the book’s content, or a definitive description of its outcome. Rather, its a declaration of intent; one that will change as the book is written. More a directional marker than a map, as it were. 12.00 pm: The roofers returned during a break in the rain to heal the breach in ‘hull integrity’ (as they say in Star Trek). 3.00 pm: I began reassembling the workstation.

December 20 (Friday). In the dream, a hand (from long ago) reached out and touched mine. 7.30 am: Morningtide.

7.45 am: A round of box bundling and removing to the garage, food storing, and general tidying. 8.30 am: Studiology. A continuing reassembly. 11.15 am: Haircut. I told my hairdresser that we’d lost 12 tiles from the main roof in Storm Darragh. By contrast, she’d lost her car in the floods, and many trees and fences in the gales. I shut up. 12.00 pm: A continuing reassembly.

2.30 pm: Completion. Testing times: all tickety-boo. Back in business. 2.45 pm: Generalised cleaning and tidying of the studio, with a touch of Spotifycation. At the close of the work period prior to a vacation, I often find myself dancing to the music –unselfconsciously, but in secret. (‘Yes John, you have a body too’, teased the inner-tutor.)