Summa: diary (October 18-24, 2025)

October 18 (Saturday).

Many windows close together.*

‘What makes you unhappy?’ I reply:

misunderstandings; forgiveness withheld; an apology scorned; an unacknowledged gift; an unresponded letter; calculated cruelty; inadvertent thoughtlessness; pleasantries, where once there was ardour; the remembrance of a wrong; the suffering of the innocent and helpless; the loss of a centre in debate; an unwillingness to either negotiate or reconcile or compromise; the small-mindedness of small people; and callous religious certitude.

October 19 (Sunday).

Between the ideal and the real; this is where I live-out my life.

I awoke at 10.00 am, still tired and conscious that my sore throat had returned. Sunday morning’s routines were undertaken very slowly — like moving and thinking through molasses. After lunch, I lay on the settee beneath the front-room window as the rain came down — tired, woozy, and drifting between dozing and a comforting semi-consciousness and disorientation that I experience only when ill. Waking dreams (‘between two worlds’). Inside my head, unintelligible conversations with friendly strangers take place, and a reassuring female voice that I didn’t recognise calls out my forename, comfortingly.

‘What do you miss?’ I reply:

the presence of friends who, ordinarily, should still be in this world; the presence of friends and family who’re still in this world, but far away; the presence in this world of Stanley Kubrick, David Bowie, and David Lynch; the world before social media, mobile phones, Brexit, and AI; polytechnics; independent art schools; the period when art was unashamedly about itself; Mam’s Tuesday, homemade meat and potato pie; liberally-salted beef-dripping sandwiches; the view of the Arael Mountain from my parents’ back garden in Abertillery; M’s humour, which was clever, silly, self-deflating, and able to reduce me to belly-aching laughter (even in public places); the cat that was always suspicious of me; and the younger sister I never had.

October 20 (Monday). Diwali.

There are places I no longer go. Gone forever, along with friends, family, and lovers who lived there.

8.30 am: I awoke, having failed to get to sleep until the early hours of this morning. Today (and for the first hour of each day last week), I’ve felt pitiful. A period of illness has always been, for me, a good time to plan, take stock, resolve, and divide what came before from what comes after the disorder. 9.30 am: Writing. 10.00 am: Studiology. ‘Get your arse in gear, John!’, goaded my inner-tutor. (He was never sympathetic to his own infirmities.) ‘Maralyn Howells’ and ‘Annette Hughes’. ‘Annette’ is the only name on the list in which every letter, save one, is repeated. This translates into an intriguing melodic progression.

11.15 am: I returned to ‘Hymn: The Sinking of Merthyr Vale Colliery (1869)’, and made minor adjustments to the brass-band melody. 1.30 pm: A minor ambulation around the neighbourhood, to test whether I could walk without losing balance and focus (as I nearly couldn’t on Saturday’s jaunt). 75% success, on this occasion. (I appear to be moving towards betterment.) 2.00 pm: I rummaged through my archive of unused digital files — leftover from previous projects in The Aural Bible series — for sonorities able to articulate the sounds of sinking a coalmine. Most weren’t what I was listening for, but could be tweaked and poked towards something more appropriate. ‘It’s a process, John. A process’.

In the evening, my wizard computer-tecky enabled the unsought Windows 11 upgrade to install on my desktop computer.

‘What must you forsake?’ I reply:

what is ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’ in this world; ‘all others’; what cannot be salvaged; luggage no longer ‘wanted on voyage’; things in the past that cannot be rectified; ‘every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset’; life’s broad roads; inadequate and inappropriate ambitions; old bruises; other peoples’ expectations; phantom foes; excuses for actions that should be owned; and the illusion that some things were as they seemed back then.

October 21 (Tuesday). 59th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster.

‘They shall not grow old’.

9.15 am: For the past half hour I’ve observed children walking along the still wet pavements to school. Fifty-nine years ago, in another place, 116 others did so for the last time. 9.30 am: Studiology. ‘Angela Hopkins’ and ‘Frederick Hanson’.

10.30 am: Back to ‘Hymn: The Sinking of Merthyr Vale Colliery (1869)’, modifying samples further, and developing a soundscape of sinking. I approach the task as though everything depended upon the soundscape (and it may well) — as though it was the foreground of the composition, while, at the same time, knowing that it’ll serve only as the backdrop, eventually. In my mind’s-ear, I’m hearing a landscape of industry: men (almost all, certainly) igniting explosives, drilling, hewing, hollering, and hammering; and the sounds of subterranean water under pressure, steam-driven pumps, a pit hooter, and pistons in motion. I was in the territory of Penallta Colliery: Sound Pictures (2022) once again.

‘What gives you courage?’ I reply:

other people’s confidence in me; the example of what my friends and colleagues have achieved; the support of family; the example of those with a developed moral and professional integrity, who refuse to apologise for their virtues; an attitude of gratitude; a powerful, if irrational, intuition that I can succeed in a particular enterprise; my past victories; a careless disregard for failure; a high pain threshold (professionally and personally); confidence in my ability to observe, diagnose, and prescribe solutions for problems; an innate tenacity, determination. and resilience, coupled with recklessness; a well-defined sense of purpose and destination; trust in the process; and a recognition that if I plug away at anything for long enough I will succeed.

October 22 (Wednesday).

Suffering may give rise to insights that aren’t accessible in any other way.

8.30 am: Another day (before the rain came and the sunshine returned).

9.30 am: Studiology. Have I turned the corner of this damnable cold? ‘Depends how broad the corner is, John’, smirked the inner-tutor, unsympathetically. For me, the sound of a pit hooter (a loud horn powered by steam) evokes a time and place that seem so remote from here and now. The fanfare — which possessed (to my mind) a preternatural ambiance — was clearly audible from my maternal grandparents’ house, less than 50 yards below Beynon Colliery, Blaina, Wales (where most of my family worked). It signalled, variously, either the anticipated return home of my grandfather at the close of his shift, or the start of another, or the imminent descent of the ‘bond’ (the cage that carried coal miners to and from the pit surface and coalface).

Throughout the morning, I modelled a hooter. Thereafter, a recording made of children playing in the school grounds close to where I live (used in another composition on the album), was slowed down and dropped in pitch by an octave to become the distant voices of adult sinkers.

1.45 pm: An earlier and shorter ambulation around my neighbourhood before pressing on with the first 30 seconds of the first composition. (‘Steady as she goes, Mr Harvey’.) The drone undergirding the final composition was added. The beginning and end of the album are now sisters.

‘What do you embrace?’ I reply:

the entreaties of those with a good heart; the faithfulness of friends who show me my blind spots; the camaraderie of faulty and disappointing human beings, like myself; an acceptance of other people’s ‘demons’; encouragement; the good example of my heroes and mentors; the optimistic conviction that ‘all things are possible’, everything is meaningful, nothing is wasted, and the struggle is worthwhile; faith in the existence of God and the eternal nature of the soul; the belief that good will finally vanquish evil, and love will prevail; and the attitudes of the Beatitudes.

October 23 (Thursday).

Content by humans about humans for humans. Accept no substitutes.

7.00 am: Morningtide.

Awake. I drank buckets of iced-water in readiness for yet another blood test at my GP surgery. 8.15 am: By the time I’d arrived, my stomach felt like a slushing cold-water bottle. The nurse offered me a flu-jab to boot. On the way home, I passed orderlies walking towards the local hospital (situated three streets away from my house) to begin the 9.00 am shift (I assume). Nurses and doctors had begun theirs, three hours earlier. The medical staff would ‘clock-off’ at 6.00 pm this evening. The NHS is still the most wonderful thing about life in the UK.

8.30 am: A necessary bowl of hot porridge before work begins. Storm Benjamin is already tentatively knocking on the door. He’d been expected. 9.00 am: Writing. 9.30 am: Studiology. ‘Brian Harris’ and ‘Richard Jones’. 10.45 am: A review and development of yesterday’s composition. 11.00 am: ‘Hot Marmite‘, please!’ (About which the recent review of my diaries had reminded me. It was my ‘go-to’ beverage in the Winter of 2018.) Clanks are added and thumps, deleted. (Real-world sounds — driving wind and rain — accompany my artifices.)

Listening. In my mind’s-ear, I’m in a dark place — somewhere between a landscape at night and a low-lit interior — spacious and reverberant, echoing the sounds of manual labour. I’m in a dangerous place, of escaping steam, hot metal, fierce fire, and dynamite. I recalled Penry Williams’s several paintings of early industry in Wales. Especially, this small watercolour of a capacious interior representing one of the marvellous ‘cathedrals’ of the new revolution.

2.00 pm: I dug into the brass-band melody, extracted from a very worn 78-rpm shellac recording of Jesus, Lover of My Soul. This had already been thoroughly reconfigured to sound nothing like the original. At one and the same time, the aim is to do justice to the poor quality of the source while making it bearable to hear. The constructed sample is examined and repaired in 3-second segments. ‘Begone, global filters!’ 3.15 pm: the worst of the storm appears to have passed.

Eventide.

‘What makes you thankful?’ I reply:

moments of spontaneous joy; happiness (in spite of everything to the contrary); my abilities and enthusiasms; my sons’ achievements; the expectation that things will change for the better; the hope that has endured thus far; the wisdom, pragmatism, and intuition of women; the recollection of a first kiss; unmerited acts of imaginative kindness; the years that have been given and are left to me; pictures, films [movies], architecture, texts, music, and sounds that enable me to feel and heal; places where I can be alone; the NHS; the influence and support of generous and loving parents; what family remains; and that I’ve never wanted for anything needful.

October 24 (Friday).

‘Go for it, John!’, she emboldened.

7.30 am: Awake (with a still sore left arm and mild flu-like symptoms, following yesterday’s vaccination). 8.00 am: ‘Porridge-fest’. 8.30 am: Writing and rumination. 9.00 am: Studiology: ‘John Jones’ and ‘Eryl Jones’. 10.00 am: On with the first ‘Hymn’, once again. ‘A day to be daring, John?’, the inner-tutor challenged. A day for turning-over preconceptions regarding what the composition should sound like. ‘Follow where the composition is going; don’t lead’. ‘You want the piece to engage too many things. Whereas, it can bear the weight of only a few things’. Sound advice.

11.00 am: In my mind’s-ear, I could now hear the brass band music as through coming from a distance, and played beneath the cover of a bandstand. Most recreational grounds in South Wales had one in the mid-19th century. The Cyfarthfa Band (below) was active in the 1860s, when Merthyr Vale Colliery was sunk.

I moved to resolve the close of the composition. Knowing a work’s destination gives me a firmer sense of its direction and pace. To give my ears a break from my own sonorities, I listened to singles from the 1960s to the 80s. Most have a playtime of under 3 minutes. A great deal of creative energy and many musical ideas are compressed into that relatively short and taut span. An extraordinary discipline. I continue to learn from this format when making compositions of a short-duration.

‘What surprises you?’ I reply:

endings; the way different people age; my proclivity to make the same mistake, again and again; a person’s willingness to act contrary to expectation, character, and their own best interests; the credulity of the masses; an apparently intractable problem that unexpectedly evaporates; how loss and grief transform love, and vise versa; people who never look back as they walk away from either me or their past, or their present predicament; and friendships that can endure the most severe deprivations.

^{* ‘Close’: to end or shut something; a short distance away, with very little space between.}

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