Summa: diary (September 13-20, 2025)

When we cannot bear our present, we take refuge in our past.
In a bad way, in a bad place, at a bad time.
A farewell is like a small-death.

September 13 (Saturday). 8.00 am: An ambulation into town, across the Promenade, and back into town again. I heard the thunder threaten on a bright and sunny day — in the North-West, where the dark clouds gathered. They followed me home.

9.15 am: I made an Excel spreadsheet into which to ‘pour’ the information about the victims provided by Glamorgan Archives. By this means, the data can be analysed statistically. No doubt I could scan the document, and commission AI to assemble the contents as I’m doing. That would save time. (I’m no touch-typist.) However, the process of manually inserting the surname, forename, age, sex, and address of each victim enables me to individuate both them and their circumstances. Patterns are observed, connections discovered, and the landscape of streets, roads, rows, and crescents made more palpable. Moreover, in dealing with the victims one-by-one, I’ve developed a conceptual and emotional bond (of sorts) with each. I’d not know these experiences had AI intervened. My engagement with both the subject matter and the process would’ve been short-circuited.

September 14 (Sunday). 9.30 am: An ambulation up and down Plasgrug Avenue, returning past the horse chestnut tree. A few seeds had fallen and been opened either by squirrels or school children. Following a short forage, I discovered one with an intact casing. This will sit on my desk until it opens.

September 15 (Monday). 5.30 am: Awake. 6.30 am: Writing and a review of the weekend’s work before heading to Llanbadarn Road for a final tea and talk with Dr Anastasia Wildig, before she leaves town for new pastures this coming week. She’ll be dearly missed. Anna returned to Aberystwyth and the university some years ago to undertake a PhD Fine Art degree. She’d studied for a BA (Hons) and an MA in Fine Art here fourteen years earlier. Prior to and after completing doctoral studies, Anna maintained her practice as an artist. She was one of my very best students. Final conversations (for now and some time to come, I expect) are often poignant and portentous. There was much to say, and much that was left unsaid. God willing, we’ll take-up where we left off, somewhere else. I’ll also miss her sexy idanthrene-green sports car. You can feel the g-force when it accelerates.

1.45 pm: I’m puzzled about why the typed list isn’t always in order within the alphabetised sections. For example, why does ‘Haines’ proceed ‘Hayes’? I assume these errors were in a handwritten document from which the typescript was made. Presumably, the typist didn’t see it as their job to correct the original. And what was the handwritten document based on? The provenance of knowledge is sometimes untraceable beyond a point. The primary source is likely to have arisen at Bethesda Chapel on the day of the disaster. Someone would’ve written down the name, age, and address of each child and adult as they were identified.

5.30 pm: A computer-tecky visited to establish whether my desktop computer can be made ‘Windows 11-ready’. Not that I am ready. ‘I’m quite unhappy with Windows 10 as it is, thank you very much!’ 7.30 am: Correspondence, with thanksgiving for friendships that have endured.

September 16 (Tuesday). 6.00 am: Writing and admin. 7.00 am: I pressed on, filling-in the Excel spreadsheet transcript. I’m struck by the similarity between the forenames of the children and adults. ‘Arthur’ and ‘Albert’ could as easily belong to an 8 year old as to a 80 years old. Likewise, ‘Glenys’, ‘Randolph’, and ‘Myrtle’. On my father’s side of the family, male forenames and second names remained static for over two hundred years. Moreover, the pool of choices was tightly circumscribed. ‘John’, ‘Trevor’, and ‘George’ predominate. ‘William’, ‘Richard’, ‘Frank’, and ‘Tom’ recur a few times. ‘Winifred’, appears only once. (A failed experiment, perhaps.) One ‘Tom”s second name is ‘Moses’. The practice of giving biblical names to people and places (such as Bethesda, Gwynedd) wasn’t uncommon in Wales.

My great great great grandfather was called ‘George Harvey’; My great great grandfather, ‘George Harvey’; my great grandfather, ‘George Harvey’ (the police sergeant); my grandfather, ‘Trevor John Harvey’; and my father, ‘Trevor George Harvey’. By contrast, today’s trends in popular nomenclature appear to change every few years. I could safely locate the incept date of a ‘Ryan’, ‘Wayne’, ‘Oscar’, ‘Stacey’, ‘India’, and ‘Olivia’ within the bracket of a few years. ‘George’ is presently on his way back, apparently.m3.00 pm: The spreadsheet was complete.

September 17 (Wednesday). In the disaster memorial area at Aberfan cemetery, there’s a segmented cross inscribed with the names of those who are buried there. I’d hoped that the Pantglas Junior School Memorial Garden would have a plaque with the names of all the dead. There’s one at both the Lockerbie Garden of Remembrance and the Hillsborough Monument Memorial. However, the garden at Aberfan doesn’t bear one. Financial restrictions may have played a part in the decision.

9.00 am: Studiology. I returned to the 144 Variations album, and reviewed the tracks made so far. I’m keeping the A Great Darkness Covered the Land album at arm’s length for now, so as to establish a critical distance at the close of the first draft. ‘David Davies’ and ‘David Davies’. They have distinguishing middle names. However, in the system of composition, only the forenames and surnames are rendered musically. This is to equalise the significance all the victims, sonically speaking. (A number have no middle name.)

1.00 pm: Gluten-free bread is hopeless for sandwiches. It has no internal cohesion, and falls apart under the butter knife. What to do?: toast! 1.45 pm: I began regularising the alphabetical order of the names, both on the typed list and my in my folder files for the project.

September 18 (Thursday). 8.30 am: Studiology. I returned to where I’d left-off yesterday, and completed the tasks. 7.00 pm: Packing, for a weekend-away celebration.

September 19 (Friday). Hay-on-Wye. 10.00 am: Departure. On the way to Hay, I stopped at the Cors y Llyn nature reserve. This wetland area is navigable via a broadwalk. Since my adventure in East Anglia in July, I’ve developed an enthusiasm for bogs. In my heart’s memory, I was back on Wicken Fen. At the same time, parts of the area summoned the moss gardens of Kyoto, which I’d seen on my visit last year. Cors y Llyn is noted for its varieties of flora and fauna. The peat deposit is 15-metres deep in places. Naked, gnarled tree trunks stand like totems … like the blasted remnants in Paul Nash’s paintings of the shell-shocked Western Front. The Scandinavian dwarf pines (some of which are over 100 years old) remind me of bonsai. I’m in Wales, but elsewhere in place and time too.

After a reasonably-priced three-course lunch (like Mark Rothko, I’m loathe to spend too much on food), I headed for Hay-on-Wye (Y Gelli Gandryll), where I’ll be staying for the next two nights. (I’ve not visited the town in over 40 years.) It’s as close to the border between Wales and England as you can get. (The River Wye [Arfon Gwy] marks the boundary.) As such, the Hay has a dual identity — one that fuses the spirits and cultures of both countries. My apartment is a converted three-storey, 18th-century town house, which was once a small pub. Noises, like footfall, communicate along the wooden beams that conjoin my rooms and those next door. At times, it sounds as though some invisible presence is sharing the flat — heard walking across the floorboards of the bedroom above my head.

Hay has more bookshops than anywhere else I’ve been to, save San Francisco. There are also several honesty libraries around the town. Some bookstores are as large as public libraries. Some are like animal-rescue centres for secondhand publications waiting for someone to take them to their heart. But this is also a town where books come to die.

There are very few multi-national companies, such as Starbucks, anywhere here. Independent businesses are king. One, an oven-fired street-pizza vendor, provided dinner.

September 20 (Saturday). 10.00 am: Into town via a decent greengrocer, nextdoor. It was an overcast morning that promised rain (and fulfilled its obligation around midday).

I experienced a Kubrickean moment in an out-of-town children’s bookshop.

One — absolutely enormous bookshop — has been converted from a cinema. Its bookshelves go deep into the space, and high. There are three-stories. The top floor touches the original ceiling of the cinema — a night sky bedecked with golden stars. Good literature takes the imagination beyond the confines of this world. Throughout the morning, I recalled Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and paused to consider when right-wing America would begin its fiery purge of ‘errant’ literature (for real). Another bookshop was formerly a Transylvanian church.

1.30 pm: Onto a vinyl record shop. In my teens, such places were like libraries: My friends and I would browse horizontal shelves, extract individual covers, turn them over, and read the track and equipment listings. Record shops were a significant contributor to our growth in awareness about contemporary music.

5.30 pm: Dinner at The Cock’, some 15-minutes drive outside Hay. Neither the ‘The Cock & Bull’ nor ‘The Cock in a Frock’. Just ‘The Cock’. Down the road, there’s a pub called ‘The Three Cocks’. But no sign of the ‘Two Cocks’, anywhere. No doubt some American visitors faint at these names. (In American translations of the Bible, ‘rooster’ substitutes for ‘cock’.) The journey there was through a fierce flash flood; the journey back, under a glowing, rainbow-graced skyscape.

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