Summa: diary (November 8-14, 2025)
These days, I receive answers to questions that I haven’t even asked.
November 8 (Saturday). 5.30 am: I awoke with a pain around my ankle. On inspection, it was red with a distinct epicenter — probably caused by an insect bite. I can spot onset cellulitis at a thousand yards. This is one ailment that can’t be ignored: ‘it requires prompt antibiotic treatment to prevent serious complications’, warns one website. Fortunately, the local A&E is only three streets away from where I live. Therefore: ‘Don’t think, John. Just go!’ Into darkness. At 6.30 am, the waiting room was empty on my arrival. Some staff were coming to the end of their 12-hour shift, while others, just beginning. It’s a city that never sleeps. Medication was dispensed, for the second time this year. (See: Summa: diary (February 1-7, 2025).) I was home, burrowing into a bowl of porridge, by 8.30 am.
9.00 am: Writing. 10.00 am: An ambulation. 11.00 am: Rest, leg-elevation, reading, ruminating (abstractly), and endless washing-up, for the remainder of the day.
November 9. Remembrance Sunday. 9.15 am: I walked to the war-graves section of the municipal cemetery to pay my respects to the fallen of both World Wars. British, Australian, and Canadian service men (representing Commonwealth countries) lie here. Some are named; others, known only to God.
My paternal grandfather (Trevor John Harvey) was a Private in the Army during the First World War. In all likelihood, the photograph below was taken soon after he’d been conscripted as an eighteen year old. It would have been either framed and placed on the mantelpiece or added to the family album by proud and anxious parents. For many service men and women, this would’ve been the last photograph of them before they died in battle. No extant member of the family knows whether my grandfather saw action. His traceable history begins in 1924, when he married. Thereafter, Trevor became a stationery-engine driver at Cwmtillery Colliery, Abertillery. Had he been killed, then, you would not be reading this. The birth and future of millions of men and women who might otherwise have had lives, friends, and families, and made a contribution to this world, never happened because their forebears had been fatalities on the battlefields of Europe.
He, my father, and Uncle Frank were among the few men in the family to join the forces. The others were coal miners, or Bevin Boys, and served their country by increasing its coal productivity.
November 10 (Monday). 7.00 am: Writing, and considering the week ahead. I’ve missed my coffee conservazione during the past three weeks. Appointments need to be made; discussion had; and life enriched.
9.00 am: Studiology. The computer ‘seemed’ stable, so I proceeded (cautiously) where I’d left-off with the third composition, last week, while re-examining track titles. Progress is slow. Caution is too much with me. Indecision dogs my steps. Work is preoccupied with too few things — that are too alike — for too long. I’ve passed the phase of discovery and moved into the phase of refinement. The suite of compositions will not change significantly, henceforth. I can hear the whole. I know the measure of it.
November 11 (Tuesday). Armistice Day. 8.00 am: Studyology. Project admin: the continuing search for promoters and backers and the refining of a project outline. At this point, I must stand as far back as I can from the project in order to both see and present it in their most distilled form, in a manner that is: comprehensible to someone who’s not a specialist; clear and simple in its objectives; and able to extol its own virtues, be persuasive, and capture the imagination.
On the weekend, I cam across an interview with Melvyn Bragg on one of my social media channels. He’s now 86 years of age, and undimmed in the speed and clarity of this thinking. In my mind’s-eye, he’ll forever be that that energetic tussled-hair young man on the South Bank Show in the late 1970s and 1980s who, evidently, had the mind of a polymath, but never flaunted it. In 2008, I contributed to a panel, lead my Bragg, to discuss Chris Ofilli‘s Upper Room (2006), as part of the Faith in the Frame TV series (ITV, UK). He was the consummate professional on that, and every other, occasion. Arguably, the finest arts interviewer of his generation.
November 12 (Wednesday). 7.00 am: Mid-week breakfast.
8.30 am: Studyology. I maintained my steer on the proposal and prospectus, while nailing down examples of musical dedications to the disaster.
‘Processing’. I know the word well. But hearing it spoken on a podcast this week, ‘brought me up short’, as they say. The activity underlies my writing — public and private. Often, I write not to communicate what I’ve understood but, rather, in order to understand. Writing — whether in the form of blogs, letters, and academic papers — serves not only to partition, order, and rationalise my thoughts but also to comprehend why I believe what I believe, — and do what I do . Furthermore, it enables me to test those convictions and practices at the bar of debate (with others and with myself).
Processing is also an affair of the heart: its self-rumination. The heart is ‘the wellspring of life’, says Proverbs. Out of it come the best and worst of our thoughts, desires, motivations, and actions. The heart can be a mill-pond or a stormy sea; calm or troubled. The heart articulates its affairs through feelings rather than words. Often, it can be understood and critiqued (in that kantian sense) only through the application of the same. And these feelings — about this, that, and the other — are frequently intermingled, and must be disentangled. Conversation and counselling, as much as writing, can be a great help in this regard.
November 13 (Thursday). 7.30 am: A colder morning. 8.30 am: Studiology. Beyond the music published via professional labels, there are a great many independently released tracks on musicians platforms such as SoundCloud and Bandcamp. They are, for the most part, songs in a folk idiom. However, there are besides a few techno, electronic, and rock tributes to the disaster too. Many of the compositions have been released in the past decade, and a number to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the disaster. The construction of a database is required to enable an analysis of this varied output.
4.00 pm: An ambulation. The annual ‘Family Fun Fair’ has returned. I’m not a fairgoer, but I do enjoy the sound. At a distance, it is a collage, superimposition, and collision of several bass-beat pounding subwoofers, loud vocal music, the noises of the rides, screams and hollers, and shouted announcements. Curiously, the sound appeared to grow louder the further I walked away from the source.
November 14 (Friday). 10.30 am: Up hill to the Arts Centre for coffee and conversation with my friend, the artist, Saoirse Morgan. Electrics were receiving attention, and the Christmas Fayre had been installed. (I refuse to begin Christmas shopping so soon before the day.
Saoirse toured me around the current two-person exhibition as part of the Wales-wide Artes Mundi 11 project. The collective exhibition received a one-star review and a right panning from The Guardian newspaper recently. Not that the reviewer had visited the Aberystwyth venue. Personally, and on the basis of having seen only reproductions of the other galleries’ displays in Swansea, Llandudno, and Cardiff, the works look like a rehash of late-modernist and postmodernist preoccupations in the late-1970s and 1980s. I long for something fresh and exceedingly well executed. Granted, the artists have endeavoured to take the past forms of art to explore the recent theme of colonialisation. That’s new. However, it does feel like a case of old wine skins and new wine — with all the proverbial warnings attached.
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