Summa: diary (November 15-19, 2025)
‘If your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!’ (Matthew 6.23)
6.30 am: Morntingtide. Looking towards the hospital (one week later). The day after the outermost edge of Storm Claudia passed over the town, without incident. (The eastern area of Wales wasn’t as fortunate.) This was a morning shot-through with quiet splendour. An this, its ‘magic hour’.
7.30 am: The Saturday ambulation. The slow dawn and low sun caught the cliff tops, roof tops, and coastline from Aberystwyth to Barmouth. On the far horizon, a white trawler burned bright against the light. The shadows were hard-edged and semi-opaque. I grieve the time when I shall leave this place. Thus, I make memories in a deliberate and self-conscious way. A treasury against the day.
9.00 am: A shoppery, all about the town, before returning home to a software problem, writing, and the beginning of Christmas preparations.
November 16 (Sunday). 6.00 am: ‘You’re so buttoned-up, John’, an acquaintance told me on several occasions. Circumspect, is the descriptor I prefer. Experience has taught me what can be discussed, and with whom. Some people, lovely though they are, can’t keep a secret even if their life depended on it. Others are too curious to know things that needn’t be known. And yet others are straightforwardly nosy. My policy is never to ask a question that would make a person feel uncomfortable. Better to listen, and allow them to disclose what they wish.
9.30 am: Ambulation 1. A walk up-and-down Plascrug Avenue, over the railway bridge (overlooking the primary school where my sons attended) and back through the cemetery: listening to the distant bell peel from St Padarn’s Church; the train arrive and depart; and the call of crows and small birds. In the silence and daylight, the funfair is divested of its ‘magic’. Instead, it appears sinister — mere mechanics.
2.30 pm: Ambulation 2. A promenade to the foothills of Constitution Hill, passed buildings I’d visited and lived-in as an MA student in the early 1980s. The facades are intact, but their interiors have been almost entirely renovated. The Irish Sea was like a still pool of grey emulsion paint, with the appearance of being a solid and expansive surface rather than a depth.
November 17 (Monday). 6.00 am: Studyology. Writing, correspondence, and database development. 8.00 am: I returned to the promotional proposal, and maintained my course for the remainder of the morning. There are times when all ability to write cogently seems to desert me. I don’t believe in writer’s block … or anyone else’s block, for that matter. You just have to push against the wall unflinchingly by continuing to write — even if that’s a hateful thing, and far below par. Maintain the discipline, and the quality will reemerge.
12.00 pm: I began entering data into a Excel sheet. Already, patterns were beginning to emerge. The earliest musical tribute to the victims is from 1968. Just two years after the tragedy. 2025 has been a fruitful year for compositions about the disaster. But I can’t determine why. Nevertheless, a historical span of over 57 years attests to the tragedy’s enduring inspiration.
5.00 pm: Eventide. The twilight of the ‘peaceable kingdom’. The afterglow of consummation. The quietening before departure.
November 18 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: Studyology. I was determined to complete the ‘Project and Funding Outline’ by the close of the morning. The account is not an abstract but, rather, a fleshed-out summary of the project in toto — one that’s digestible, engaging, comprehensible (at some level) to the general public, and void of jargon. The next iteration will be longer and fuller. And the one after that, comprehensive. The more I write, the greater my understanding of what I do. Some artists refuse to talk about their work. They leave that to others. I appreciate the position. Self-rumination may make an artist too aware of what they do; it may stymie intuition and instinct. I warned all my intending PhD Fine Arts students regarding the risk of engaging a 40,000 word para-thesis about their practice. However, all — to a woman and man — testified the writing was one of the hardest — yet most rewarding and thoroughly illuminating — endeavours that they’d ever essayed.
1.00 pm: Project descriptor completed, just in the nick of time. 2.00 pm: On with allied admin related to Wales’s national institutions. Can we collaborate or, at the very least, co-operate? There’s so little money in the system these days. Cut backs have cut deep. Many projects of quality and relevance may never see the light of day, for want of funding. But one cannot not make things. Art, like love, finds a way. Even when there is money in the coffers, a failure of institutional vision can stifle progress. And that, in my experience, is a problem of an altogether more intractable and dispiriting order — for which there’s no excuse. 7.00 pm: I completed the listing of songs from one of the music platforms.
November 19 (Wednesday). 6.00 am: Studyology. On, then, with the second of the two music platforms. Database entry is tedious. I don’t waste the day’s best energies on a task like this. 9.00 am: Completed. There are close to 80 compositions dedicated to the disaster. Most are individual songs; a few are small suites and albums. I returned to the project outline and retooled the text for a broader audience and art establishments. What could be the nature of my collaboration with Welsh national institutions? I’ve a big plan and a small plan.
11.00 am: Into the cold for a long-overdue haircut. 11.45 am: I dug into one of the digital-conversion-failure photographs: ‘David Davies’. I blew-up the image repeatedly until all semblance of what little figuration there was disappeared into abstraction. It’s at this point the image becomes more ‘painterly’. Pacing back-and-fore in one of my mind’s-room was an idea for a public lecture, as well as a small visual-art exhibition, to accompany the project. These are possibilities, rather than probabilities.
In and around work, preparations for a journey were made. 4.00 pm: An ambulation into a cold (once again) but nonetheless consoling late afternoon. ‘Might it be possible that the very lucidity and intensity of our desires will bring them to pass, one day?’
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