Summa: diary (September 22-26, 2025)

September 22 (Monday). Equinox. 7.30 am: An ambulation to buy milk. An autumnal chill. A hurry home. 8.30 am: Getting back into gear, writing, and illustrating last week’s blog. 9.00 am: Studiology. A review of 144 Variations to date. The project now has its own momentum. 9.30 am: Research admin. I’m developing project descriptors with which to approach sponsors and funders. In regard to A Great Darkness Over the Land, I can now see the end from the beginning. As I look towards the exit points of both projects — in October 2016 — my attention is already gravitating towards the ‘Whatever next?’ domain. ‘Sandra Donovan’, ‘Ian Dougall’, and ‘Yvonne Drage’.

Work proceeds too slowly. I listen to the undertow, below the waterline of life: friends making adjustments; the distance between ‘send’ and ‘receive’, widening; new footings; an uncertain renegotiation; and the inevitability (knowing that this is it, at long last).

7.15 pm:

September 23 (Tuesday). 6.00 am: Writing. 7.30 am: Studiology. I turned to Jane Elisa Leeson’s ‘Loving Shepherd of thy Sheep’, published in her Hymns and Scenes of Childhood (1842) — being the other hymn sung at the Aberfan victims’ funeral. The tune is L G Hayne’s ‘Buckland’. This will form the basis of the final composition: ‘Jimi Kissed the Ground’. Famously, Hendrix improvised around the tune of Francis Scott Key’s ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at the Woodstock Festival on August 18, 1969. The performance provides the precedent for a re-imagined interpretation of Hayne’s tune. Its metre is 7.7.7.7 — indicating the number of syllables in each line of Leeson’s lyric.

9.00 am: ‘Jean Evans’ and ‘Maureen Evans’. 10.30 am: An analysis of the tune, bar-by-bar. The bars are treated as eight independent units of sound, comprising 4 and 3 elements alternately, rather than as sub-divisions or measures of the whole melody. This enables the units to be disassembled and re-assembled in other than their intended or habitual order. In so doing, this composition is conceived in the same way as the others: that’s to say, constructed of parts derived from a coherent source and, thereafter, dis-organised to form an entirely new, unified whole.

1.30 pm: Guitarology. (Which sounds like a song by either Django Reinhardt or Charlie Parker.) The aim is to learn the eight units, played at different positions and octaves on the fretboard, before recording commences.

September 24 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Webology. Updating the ‘News’ and other sections of the main website. ‘Begone “X” [formerly Twitter]’. ‘Hello “Bluesky“!’ The annual review of the main website’s integrity is always a salutary reminder of what has been achieved (or not) to date. It serves as an archive of what has been, and as an anticipation of what’s to come. Several sections, most notably, those related to ‘Teaching’, aren’t likely to be added to in the years ahead. Likewise, ‘Conference Papers’ will remain static until such time as I can be coaxed to contribute again. In the time that remains, what is essential for me to do? The one thing that does change (constantly and alarmingly) is my appearance. What do web-authors do ‘when hoary hairs shall their temples adorn’? (to quote R Keen’s (et al) hymn ‘How Firm a Foundation’ (1787)). My once dark hair and beard has turned salt and pepper (way beyond my temples) over the past five years. But the page-portraits haven’t kept pace.

7.30 pm: A review of my curriculum vitae (or résumé). Prior to the Internet, the ‘CV’ was the only calling card available: informative, entirely text based, often poorly laid out, and not a little dull. My main site is an expanded and illustrated version of the same. And then there’s the several online profiles besides to update. Evening work. This is not a task to which I’m willing to devote the best energies of my day.

September 25 (Thursday). 6.00 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studiology. ‘Marjorie Evans’ and ‘Howell Evans’. 11.08 am: A power cut. 11.12 am: A recovery of power, followed by a mild migraine. I rarely get one. One-sided throbbing, nausea, light and sound sensitivity, and flashes on my peripheral vision. The works. Music became intolerable. So I returned to the study, and took-up website updating once more — which requires only half a brain at best.

Why is the Academia site so ponderous, and forever mutating into a something less user-friendly? Some software goes from bad to worse; from the barely intuitive to the wholly counter-intuitive. 5.30 pm: A second out-of-hours call from my computer-tecky. He worked for an hour-and-a-half coaxing the motherboard of my desktop PC to accept incremental drive-upgrades in preparation for Windows 11. (Spit!). By the close of the evening, my website presences were finally up-to-date as well.

September 26 (Friday). 7.00 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Turn on computer … DEAD! Something related to the power supply has failed, I’ll wager. A flare sent up for the computer-tecky. (Sigh!) I thought the morning’s studiology would have to be cancelled. 10.30 am: The computer-tecky responds to my distress, and asks whether the ‘on/off’ switch at the rear of the tower is in the correct position. ‘What switch?’, I responded. There’s something new to be learned everyday. I’m back in business.

In the meantime. I’d begun a draft the textual descriptor for the 144 Variations album, and maintained the same course until lunchtime. 1.30 pm: ‘Anthony England’, ‘Gareth Evans’, and beyond. 4.00 pm: An ambulation in what felt like the last days of a Summer that was. Bathers took to the sea, ice cream vendors were busy, and Freshers moved, wide-eyed and with deliberateness, around the town like astronauts on a foreign planet.

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