Summa: diary (August 16-22, 2025)

What in myself have I hidden from myself?

August 16 (Saturday). An abundance of cooking apples in the garden. The anticipation of crumbles and tarts to come. 7.00 am: A morning ambulation across the length of the Promenade. At this time of the year, the quality of light after sunrise and before sundown resemble one another more closely than in any other season. The light vivifies all it graces.

10.00 am: The rest of the day was taken up with errands, shopping, dusting, vacuum cleaning, and endless washing-up, while prodding and tweaking the first of the 144 compositions based on the names of the Aberfan victims (see: Summa: diary (August 11-15, 2025) and avoiding the heatwave.

August 17 (Sunday). 5.00 am: The bleep made by one of the smoke detectors in the stairwell woke me. Its battery needed changing. ‘But why choose to go off on the one day I can lie in?’, I remonstrated, ‘Bleep!’, it replied, indifferently. 7.00 am: Ambulation 1. I returned to the Promenade.

10.45 am: Ambulation 2. 10.45 am: I’d not visited Tan-y-Bwlch Beach for a longtime. From the harbour wall, looking north, you can see its counterpart on the other side of the harbour entrance (where I was standing this morning), and the southern-most edge of town. It felt like I’d gone behind Alice’s looking-glass. On one side of the beach is the Irish Sea, and on the other the Yswth Arfon [River Ystwyth]. From the river, the seaward profile of Pen Dinas is visible. In some translations, the name is rendered Pen-y-Dinas [Head of the Citadel]. This iron-age hill fort, topped with a monument to the Duke of Wellington, stands above the town like a sentinel. The mound doesn’t exhibit the sensuous mammary formation of Silbury Hill, Wiltshire — which looks as though it had suddenly materialised in the prehistoric landscape, fully formed. Pen Dinas, by contrast, has been carved into a preexisting and natural landmass over time.

In the middle distance, looking south, set upon a rise beyond the fields, is Plas Tanybwlch [Tanybwlch Mansion]. Built in 1825, among its previous owners was Rudolf Schenker, guitarist for the German rock band the Scorpions. Local legend has it that he dedicated one room to Jimi Hendrix.

August 19 (Monday). 5.45 am: A dismal night’s sleep. Was it the trifle I ate? 6.15 am: Writing. 8.00 am: Studiology. The proposed set of sound-name transformations derived from ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’ is presently conceived as an adjunct album. 144 Variations on a Theme by Joseph Parry for the Victims of Aberfan will be completed and released on October 20, 2026, the day before the release of Darkness Covered the Land: 15 sound postcards of Aberfan, on the 60th anniversary.

I proceeded to the second of the 144 variations: ‘Lynda Anderson’. She, I imagine, was Carol Anderson’s elder sister. 12.00 am: It took four hours to resolve the composition. (Subsequent compositions were completed in far less time.) The assembly of the sound-letter samples requires some of the same skills as a concert pianists deploys. That’s to say, an interpretative approach. Speed, pace, emphasis, attack, decay, tension, release, and phrasing, all come into play. Each composition will be, I anticipate, around 1-minute long. 3.30 pm: ‘Malcolm Andrew’ was completed. The outcome of ‘all this conceptualising and processing’ did, to my mind, reach down into a wounded heart.

4.00 pm: An ambulation through town, down Plasgrug Avenue, and around the Municipal Cemetery. The sky and air were heavy and motionless. Polished marble gravestones recalled early photographs.

August 20 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: Writing. 8.00 am: Research admin. I’m in search of a definitive list of the victims. Surprisingly, it has proved hard to come by. Glamorgan Archives may come-up trumps (pardoning the expression). 9.00 am: Studiology. On with ‘Dennis Arscott’, followed by ‘Kelvin Andrew’, the brother of Malcolm Andrew in all likelihood. To lose one child tragically and unexpectedly is almost unthinkable; to lose two children together is incomprehensible. I’ve a cousin and her husband who lost a son in a road accident shortly after he’d graduated. When I visit their home, he’s still ‘there’ — in his parents’ warm remembrances, their funny stories about him, the graduation photograph on the mantlepiece, and his collection of records by the Beatles. They carry their grief without bitterness.

The compositions enable me to spend time with each one of the victims. The vast majority I know only only by name. When I visit the cemetery in a few weeks time, I’ll be able to connect some of the names to faces, by virtue of the ceramicised photographs on the headstones.

1.45 pm: Now that the 144 Variations was underway (I’ll be making at least one-a-day for the next few weeks), I returned to the ‘144: a biblical number’ track, and digital typewriters. I worked my way through varieties of digital-typewriter-keyboard emulations. Safe downloads are hard to find. Too often they’re bundled together with other (untrustworthy) software that I don’t require. 3.00 pm: I found my quarry: a software that was bona fide, recommended, explained, simple, and straightforward to install and (as importantly) to uninstall. I brought out “Old Dusty”!’ — my clunkiest computer keyboard (ever) — for a test-run.

August 20 (Wednesday). 6.30 am: Writing, and a review of the work made so far this week. Breakthroughs come unannounced. It’s true what they say about walking: the activity clears and prepares the mind to receive possibilities. When the windows are thrown open, sunlight enters.

9.00 am: Studiology. ‘Merril Barnard’. The compositions are different one from another. Just like the victims’ names. At the same time, the compositions and names are the same, to the degree that they derive from a common pool of musical phrases and letters. Diversity in continuity.

11.00 am: A visit to the studio of my friend, the artist Susan Forster, for conversation over coffee. On the table of talk today: family, aging, bereavement, travel, memorable places, art, and cats (again). 1.45 pm: I continued to learn how to type, sonically.

2.00 pm: Hoorah! Glamorgan Archives can deliver. I shall pay them a visit when I’m in Cardiff in a fortnight. 3.00 pm: ‘Royston Barrett’. 4.00 pm: An ambulation. I bumped into several friends and acquaintances en route. A friend of a friend remarked: ‘You don’t look old enough to be retired’. I shall be nourished by that incontestable judgement for the remainder of the week … at least.

August 21 (Thursday). 5.45 am: When the day awakes, I awake. 8.00 am: Studiology. Today, I’d oscillate between piano and typewriter composition while filing links on my computer desktop, and returning to the series of glitched renderings derived from motion picture stills of the disaster. (See: Summa: diary (July 7-10, 2025).) 10.30 am: ‘Betty Bartlett’. (Many ‘t’s.) 12.30 pm: ‘Margaretta Bates’. Could I make 144 glitched images — one for every track? It’s only when I embarked upon setting-up memorials for each of the victims that I realised how many there had been.

1.30 pm: An ambulation and shoppery, while bumping into another friend and coffee collegiate. (One who has fallen-off the ‘chatchup’ rota during this past year.) 7.30 pm: On the study desk this evening:

August 22 (Friday). Glorious morning. 6.30 am: Writing. I’d been asked to revisit my experience of suffering from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) (past and present). It was the topic of my blog ME and Me, published in 2017. Thus, I concluded:

Cardinal symptoms (at the height of the illness):
‘brain fog’ (as though I was thinking in syrup), and memory lapses;
impaired spatial awareness (left and right confusion, and estimating distances);
intermittent muscle ache, in my upper legs particularly;
periodic low mood;
severely reduced energy levels (‘tired-all-the-time’ syndrome);
digestive problems, and food and drink intolerance (principally to gluten, citrus, caffeine, and alcohol);
IBS-like disorders;
the symptoms were inconstant in their intensity on a day-to-day basis;
not all the symptoms were present at any one time.

Cardinal symptoms (after the height of the illness):
persistent food intolerance (although, while I can now consume citrus, I’ve acquired a pronounced reaction to quinine and yeast);
the consequent adverse reaction results in temporary lethargy, ‘brain-fog’, and disrupted sleep patterns;
chronic non-allergic rhinitis and localised eczema (caused by an intolerance to, and an over-production of, histamines).

Considerations:
not all of my maladies are necessarily ME related (it’s tempting to see patterns and make connections where there are none to be found);
my condition is nothing like as severe as it was at the height of the illness;
however, while the storm has passed, the damage it caused remains.

8.30 am: Studiology. ‘David Beynon’ and ‘Kay Bowns’. Inevitably, some of the earliest name-to-sound piano compositions will be redone in the light of a later understanding of their pace, and a more developed craft. Alongside, I continued manufacturing synthetic-typing sound files and digital-conversion-failure photographs. Sound, text, and image in rotation. There was a time, in October 1966, when someone typed-out a list of the victims’ names for the first time — just as I’m doing. 11.30 am: ‘Robert Breeze’.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice