Summa: diary (October 11-17, 2025)

October 11 (Saturday).

‘Do you demand enough of yourself, John?’

8.15 am: An ambulation, passed places of personal significance, silent sea, and the railway station where, this time last week (9.20 am), I said ‘Goodbye’.

9.30 am: Studiology. I made a further ten digital-conversion-failure photographs in readiness for the next batch of name-conversion compositions on the 144 Variations album. 12.00 pm: I returned to last week’s auto-interrogation (October 5 (Sunday)). It would prove unwieldy and utterly dispiriting to face all my questions at once. The first will turnover quietly in the background of my mind during the next few days, like some antiviral software in stealth mode. If nothing else, my responses will throw-up a myriad lacks, losses, failures, and neglects that’ll require an address.

October 12 (Sunday).

I fantasise conversations with those whom either I’ll never talk again, or who are themselves fantasies.

1.30 pm: An ambulation alongside the regenerating Old College. For me, it has become an active metaphor. Some years ago, I taught in the upper-studios of this dank, weather-worn, crumbling, neglected, and increasingly unsafe, but glorious, landmark. These were qualities that enamoured the place to students and staff alike (unless you faced mobility challenges, that is.) On the pavement, along its south side, are now the powdering remnants of sandstone embellishments from the upper-stories of the building. They haven’t touched the ground since it was first erected in the 1860s. They’re being replaced by pristine replicas. With money, time, talent, and commitment, the Old College will be ‘changed from glory into glory’ (to quote from Charles Wesley’s hymn). And so I look at that other aging and crumbling edifice, in which my soul resides, with resolve and optimism. The weekend has been one of realisations and determinations. Something is afoot.

‘What makes you cautious?’. I reply:

a mistrust of my own and other peoples’ motivations; an awareness than my enthusiasms can be capricious; the suspicion that my ambitions may outrun my abilities; doubt that I know my own mind, fully; a fear that I haven’t fully reckoned on the consequences of a proposed course of action; a feeling that I don’t have the necessary time, energies, and resources to fulfill an obligation; fear that the outcome of a decision could be hurtful to either me or others; and my track record of folly.

October 13 (Monday).

If I’ve endured and survived these things, then, I can face almost any challenge.

7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: I’ve resumed a systematic and rigorous exercise regime that had fallen into abeyance over the last year. 9.00 am: Studyology. I feel compelled to map my industry, ambitions, ‘the fruit of a long experience’ (to quote Max Ernst), and the affairs of the heart, during the last eleven years in particular. (A reckoning.) The online diaries are my chart. (They ought to be renamed: John Harvey: A Cautionary Tale.) A morning and afternoon reading Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018).

Diaries can make for fearful reading. The writer has no inkling about what’s to come in their life: on the one hand, there will be hopes dashed; fears and failures realised; mistakes repeated; debilitations, weaknesses, and indulgences left unchecked; love lost; loved ones, lost; friendships abandoned; misunderstandings, disillusionments and disappointments; foolish acts and words; dreadful revelations; ambitions thwarted; illusions and delusions; inabilities exposed; conflicts and questions unresolved; and the seeds of calamity sown. On the other hand, there’ll be unimaginable changes of circumstance; unlikely opportunities; undeserved restorations; rich conversations; remarkable discoveries; and moments of joy, fresh insight, and dizzying clarity. But not one of these things (bad or good) will be either unnecessary or wasted in the providential economy.

‘January 16, 2017’, Diary (July 16, 2014–September 4, 2018).

My read-through of the dairies is part of a quinquennial review of their structural integrity, following a recent technical overhaul. When I first began blogging, I wrote almost exclusively to myself. Within six months, the posts addressed a small if ill-defined audience beside. Thereafter, my current students and potential applicants to the School of Art’s degree schemes were chief among my foci. Thereafter, I wrote for other visual and sounds artists, art historians, academics, diarists and, as it transpired, someone who was to come. (An overview of the first dairy was presented in: My Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018).)

4.00 pm: An ambulation. Looking westward across the Irish Sea towards the east coast of Ireland.

October 14 (Tuesday).

Don’t wait. Don’t anticipate. Don’t search. Don’t look back. (‘Remember Lot’s wife’.) Don’t repeat. Don’t hope. Even though you can do no other.

7.30 am: My cold worsens. 8.00 am: A communion. Studyology: Yesterday evening, I began re-reading my second diary (September 15, 2018 to June 30, 2021). I continue in this vein. Reliving my life, day-by-day (more-or-less) is punishing, painful, humbling, and disappointing. Nevertheless, I enjoy looking again at photographs of the School of Art’s studios, classrooms, and corridors, my colleagues, and the backs of the students’ heads (to preserve their anonymity). I still appreciate my ‘asides’ — which were often ‘typed’ on paper, and crumbled to appear as though they’d been redeemed from a wastepaper bin — that few beside myself understood. I value too, and beyond measure, the remembrance of those who came and went, whose influence on my life has been profound and lasting. And I long to understand something, this time round, that evaded my grasp back then.

Advice to a student who contemplated blogging:

My blog is cast in the mould of a daily diary. As such, each day presents events, encounters, opportunities, and tasks that I can draw upon as the basis of my writing. In essence, I write to understand who I am and what I should do. But I’m conscious that there’s also a readership that’s interested in what I do. And so, I discuss my work as an artist, scholar, and teacher too. I would suggest that you begin by writing a 200-word account of some aspect of your work in progress, rather than try and include everything that’s taking place in your life right now.

‘February 8, 2017’, Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021).

On this day, five years ago:

The second diary (from September 15, 2018 to June 30, 2021) included the period of the pandemic. The threat presented the greatest challenge to teaching in my entire career. That said, it was also one of the most rewarding experiences in my career. Staff, besides being academics and pedagogs, became equally the students’ counsellors, fellow sufferers, loyal supporters, friends-in-need, confidants, and shoulders to cry on. In response to a blessed Module Evaluation Questionnaire, I responded:

We hope NEVER to teach this module under such circumstances EVER again. Staff and students were grateful that we got to the end of it intact, and with some sense that a meaningful and supportive exchange of ideas, teaching, and learning had taken place. 

‘January 19, 2021’, Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021).

On June 14, 2021, I indicated that this present Intersections blog would take up the mantle of the previous two diaries — which it did, in June-August of that year. Over 1,900 posts and 11 years later, the dairy is still going … because I’m still going.

‘What do you avoid?’ I reply:

parties, and most large social gatherings (if truth be told); eating alone in restaurants; long journeys on a bus; intemperate people; confrontations that threaten to escalate; cold callers; charismatic personalities; manipulative bullies; flatterers; judgmental, self-justifying, self-righteous, self-absorbed, leeching, lying, ungenerous complainers; fair-weather ‘friends’; and avocados, gluten, shellfish, alcohol, and quinine.

October 15 (Wednesday).

I’m wary of making not a failed piece of work but, rather, one that doesn’t succeed sufficiently.

7.30 am: A communion. 8.15 am: A battle — to cancel, by phone, a hospital appointment that had been arranged for tomorrow — took three quarters of an hour to win. And it needn’t have been a struggle if the exchange system was sensibly designed. (Sigh!) 9.30 am: Dread of dread. I took the plunge, and began installing Windows 11 on my desktop. My pessimism, where it comes to computers, is rarely ever misplaced. The upgrade didn’t. I sent up a flare to summon my tecky. Wisdom is knowing when to hand over a problem to someone whose specialist experience and intuitions are greater than one’s own.

10.30 am: Studiology (finally). ‘Stephen Hopkins’ and ‘Pamela Heaman’ (sound and images).

12.15 pm: I relistened to the first and last compositions from the Darkness Covered the Whole Land: sixteen sound postcards of Aberfan album: ‘Hymn: The Sinking of the Merthyr Vale Colliery (1869)’; and ‘Hymn: That Sadness Remained for a Long Time (1966-2026)’. These would be resolved as a pair. Whether in image, sound, or word, my work has, since the mid-1980s, engaged the past, including: the Judaeo-Christian tradition of visualisation and sonification; biblical texts and images; the visual and acoustic culture sixteenth to early century paranormal phenomena; eighteenth to mid-twentieth century coal mining history and imagery; chronicles, theologies, and artefacts (visible and audible) in the Protestant Reformation to Nonconformist period; personal autobiography (including my diaries); and family history. The work has also engaged the landscapes in which these events, things, and people have taken place: those of Wales, the Bible, and worlds unseen.

1.45 pm: A began reconfiguring printouts, derived from screenshots derived from motion-capture of the Aberfan disaster, as 4:3 ratio images (summoning the format of black and white TVs in the mid 1960s in the UK). 4.00 am: An ambulation. One tabloid at the newsagents displayed its usual cutting-edge critique of the country’s societal and cultural malaise. I returned home, down Plascrug Avenue, in the warm late-afternoon sunshine. Thankful.

‘What do you regret?’ I reply:

not speaking up, when I could; not following up, when I should; not rendering assistance, when I had the means and opportunity so to do; giving up on someone too soon; not recognising a situation before it was too late; and confiding in those who were constitutionally indiscreet. And there are the things that some would say I ought to regret. But I don’t. They’ve variously either taught me salutary lessons, or enriched my life immeasurably, or saved me from something far far worse. (Life is messy.)

October 16 (Thursday).

What makes me indecisive is often the fear of making a wrong decision.

8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: A review of the early Intersections posts. My life flashes before my eyes, as in the moment of death. My cold deepens, and the tiredness is more profound. A ‘day of small things’ (which I won’t despise), therefore. My reckoning on the past during these last few days has been neither fruitless nor damaging. I still own all that I wrote, including a recognition of the: routine; repetition; (echoes of echoes); tiredness; resignation; relentlessness; weathering (storm-after-storm); self-absorption; punishing self-analyses; tiresome self-referentiality; predictable ambulations; deep misgivings; tyranny of the past; slightness; ‘stuckness’; insularity; longed-for ‘reunion’ (that should never happen); and uncertainty as to whether they were still in the audience. (For a global perspective of both diaries and Intersections, see: My Blog: A 10th-Anniversary Overview (2014 – 2024).)

And at my elbow: arm, hand, and finger workouts (to aid guitar playing); and a new, cheap cassette-tape recorder (to accompany my ambulations).

‘What frustrates you?’ I reply:

my inability to transcend personal limitations; my manifest ‘propensity to f*ck things up’ (to quote Francis Spufford); the recognition that life is fleeting, and there’s still so much to be done (ars longa vita brevis); hope deferred; the prosperity of the wicked; my chronic ailments; the deficits that come with aging; endless medical consultations without a satisfactory resolution; persistent preoccupations that I fail to exorcise; my untested idealism; my inconstancy; and poorly-written equipment manuals.

October 17 (Friday).

Either repeat or repent.

7.15 am: Morningtide.

Late yesterday evening, while wading through the backwaters of my past, I looked at online photographs, taken in 1977-8 (the year after I’d left the comprehensive school at Nantyglo, Gwent), portraying cohorts of pupils and staff comprising the four houses into which it it was divided. (The school is no longer.) There were faces I’d not seen since that time: teachers who’d been variously either mad, bad, and sad, or astonishing, inspiring, and life-saving; and peers (some of whom were as decidedly odd as they looked) who shared my largely unsatisfactory and dispiriting secondary school [high-school] education.

The sole photograph I appear in, post-infant education, was taken during my first and only year in grammar school, at Abertillery, Gwent, on March 31, 1971.

11.00 am: Studiology. I’ve received the blessings of growing older, a spouse and children, abiding friendships, and a fulfilling career. ‘Linda Hodkinson’ (aged 8) and ‘Royston Hodkinson’ (aged 9) did not. 12.00 am: I returned to the first composition, with ideas derived from the technology of sinking shafts in coalmines during the second half of the 19th century: steam pumping, blasting, and drilling. Much noise.

‘What disappoints you?’ I reply:

the current political discourse; problems that must remain unresolved; failures of the will; those who have conspicuous talent, but not the drive and confidence to realise it; my own achievements; the reach and impact of my work; that I still yearn for things that cannot be, and compare myself with others needlessly; and that my parents didn’t live long enough to see a return on their investment in me.

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