Summa: diary (December 13-19, 2025)

December 13 (Saturday).

The ideal endures because it has never been tested against reality.

7.15 am: I was led by a bright-star into the town, passed illuminated Christmas trees and decorated domestic facades that had twinkled bright all through the night, when no one but God was looking. Stars in the heavens; stars on the earth. Here I am … . Following stars can be a perilous venture. (See: Advent: Star Trek.)

9.00 am: Back to the workbench, where I continued modifying the Christmas tree angel — an enterprise that had begun on December 11, 2024.) This morning, he/she needed a light to hold, so that his/her face could be lit-up, high-up. Having stripped-down a USB 2.0 cable, I realised that I’d no idea how the plug’s architecture was configured. Spotify provided a background of 1960s-80s songs. If I’m alone, with music in my ears and a Stanley knife in my hand, I dance like Mr Blonde in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992). I’d be mortified if anyone saw me. (Stealers Wheel’s ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ (1972), to which Michael Madsen’s character moved threateningly in the movie, just happens to be on my playlist.) However, my choreographic repertoire is broader than this. (See: September 22, 2018).

Ain’t it a principle built into the fabric of the universe: there’s never bell wire in the toolbox when you need it. 11.00 am: Shoppery, for materials, followed by soldering and assembly. This angel has more electrical juice, wiring, and circuitry than the Terminator.

December 14 (Sunday). The third Sunday in Advent.

I‘ve been a miner for a heart of gold … and I’m getting old (Neil Young, ‘Heart of Gold’, Harvest (1972)).

9.15 am: The Sunday morning pre-Eucharist ambulation. En route, I retreated into the backrooms of my mind (where no one else can go), and turned-over the scenes of a life that I’ve never lived, as though they were 35 mm-slide transparencies.

2.00 pm: A return to the Arts Centre to peruse the Christmas Fayre and revisit the Artes Mundi 11 exhibition. ‘What do you feel when you look at these works?’, someone asked me. It wasn’t a question that I could possibly answer. Visual art, for me, has never been an emotional trigger. My encounter is strictly visual and cerebral. But, then again, thinking is a mode of feeling in my books.

4.00 pm: Eventide. As the light declined, I sat in the lounge, in the creeping darkness, and watched a neighbour decorate a Christmas tree in their first-floor front room window. (My Rear Window moment.) One day (I promised myself), I’ll spend a whole day looking out onto the street from my ground-floor lounge window.

December 15 (Monday).

Sound. Image. Text. It’s all one.

7.00 am: A communion. 7.30 am: Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I booted-up my desktop computer and peered into the webcam: ‘Just checking to see if it is you. Try moving further away’, my on-screen security advised. Intuitively, I sensed that there was some deeper wisdom about identity, certainty, proximity, perspective, and self-affirmation on offer too. Over the past week, I’ve been re-reading the year’s blogs, in reverse … to locate myself, once again.

This is the beginning of the last week of work before the Christmas vacation. Reluctantly, I returned to the still problematic penultimate track. ‘Just f*cking do it!’, was the last thing a friend wrote to me before the plug was pulled, long-time past. Their impatient imperative has served me well, whenever I’ve dawdled. A weekend away from the composition had worked wonders. For the first time, I glimpsed the track’s totality, and heard (in my mind’s-ear) how it would end. The best solutions always have a rightness and an inevitability about them, both intrinsically and in respect to the whole.

1.45 pm: A remembrance: I looked back one hundred and two months.

I kept ‘f*cking’ doing it for the remainder of the afternoon. It’s tempting to throw everything at the composition. But the answer lies, more often than not, in removing as many elements as practicable — in the interests of economy and efficiency — but without compromising the interest of the work overall. 4.00 pm: An ambulation through the town and across the Promenade. The starlings had already gathered beneath the pier. I heard the murmur of a sleepy murmuration. Troubled clouds gathered in the north. Rain following.

December 16 (Tuesday).

‘Write me a poem about heartache and longing’.

9.00 am: An appointment with the dental hygienist. While in the waiting room: ‘Ooh! Colouring’. That little boy still lives-on inside of me. The surgery’s practitioner is a winsome advocate of the electric toothbrush. But, he confesses to not flossing everyday. I’ve a soft-spot for those who don’t always practice what they preach. [Hand goes up.]

10.00 am: Studiology. The penultimate track is 80% complete. Before optimising resolution, I reviewed the last track: ‘Hymn: That Sadness Remained for a Long Time (1966-2026)’. A little tweaking, and it was ready for phase 3 — the final pass (after the vacation). 12.00 pm: Back to the 15th track. ‘How difficult can this be, John?’, the inner-tutor goaded. 12.30 pm: Done as done can be, at this phase. On, then, to set in sound: ‘Ann Lee’ and ‘Susan Meredith’, for the 144 Variations on a Theme by Joseph Parry for the Victims of Aberfan album. I’d like to get to the 100th name by close of business on Friday.

2.00 pm: ‘Robert Minney’ and ‘Barbara Minney’. The latter’s forename is intriguing, in terms of its alphabetical economy and distribution — especially when sonified:

B A R B A R A

3 × A; 2 × B; 2 × R

3.00 pm: I was also intent on creating one hundred digital-conversion-failure photographs. Onwards, then (I suppose).

4.00 pm: An ambulation. Now the students have ‘gone down’ and the tourists are few and far between, the town has returned to its permanent residents. We’re comparatively few in number. And all this is ours.

Everyone once and awhile, on Facebook, a discussion about putative hauntings at the School of Art rises up like Samuel’s ghost (1 Samuel 28). The Edward Davies Building (where the School is situated) was built in 1907 as the university’s chemistry laboratories. I added my penny’s worth:

Over the years, I’ve heard a variety of accounts of supernatural occurrences at the School of Art. None of them suggest either menace or malevolence. Years ago, I deliberately visited the building very late at night and in the early morning (when it was unlikely that any staff or students would be inside), with a camera and sound recorder, in search of phenomena. I neither saw nor heard anything.

When the heating goes off, the wood in the building (and there’s a great deal of it) contracts, creaks, and ‘moans’ quite alarmingly.

Main darkroom, first floor, School of Art, Aberystwyth University (March 16, 2014). One student claimed to sometimes see the ghost of a small boy in a striped tee-shirt looking at her from a corner of the room (left) as she worked.

The university’s Old College, too, has a been the site of a number of paranormal occurrences, supposedly. On July 8-9, 1885, three Aberystwyth men — James Brett, Samuel Jones, and John Davies — died in a fire (which had begun in the building’s chemistry laboratory) trying to save the College’s museum and library treasures from destruction. Some believe that they are the cause of the disturbances. One wonders whether any of the workers currently renovating the Old College have encountered this heroic trio. In ghostlore, it’s believed that a significant restructuring of a formerly haunted building can sometimes reignite spectral activity.

December 17 (Wednesday).

‘Only want to know about love’, John Martyn, ‘Don’t Want to Know’, Solid Air (1973).

7.45 am: Writing. 8.30 am: Studiology. Today’s objective: to complete one hundred sound settings and corresponding digital-conversion-failure photographs of the victims’ names. ‘Cheryl Mortimer’, ‘Carl Minnett’, ‘Maralyn Minnett’. ‘Can you at least countenance the possibility that you may get some things right the first time, John!, the inner-tutor chided, impatiently. (‘Someone had got out on the wrong side of the bed this morning’, I mumbled under my breath.)

John Harvey, ‘Richard Jones’, digital-conversion-failure photograph (2025).

11.45 am: How strange. Having just watched, in my tea break, a YouTube excerpt of the progressive rock keyboard player Rick Wakeman performing his The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1973), the doorbell rang. Standing in the porch was, to my surprise, the piano tuner. He’d come to make the domestic Bechstein sparkle again. He also tunes Wakeman’s Steinways. I’ve a longstanding affection for a denuded upright piano: evidential cause and effect in unitary repetition. The sound of the strings being lovingly coaxed back into their right relation to A (A440 (440 Hz)) and one another is a spiritual metaphor, to my mind. In a similar vein, the guitarist Robert Fripp wrote: ‘When I tune the guitar, I tune my soul’.

2.15 pm: ‘Philip Mumford’, ‘Edward Mumford’, and ‘Norma Mumford’ — sound, image, and text. 3.30 pm: ‘Albert Mytton’ (64 years of age), ‘Lucy Mytton’ (74 years of age) — two residents on Moy Road who were killed in their homes when the tip fell — and ‘Geoffrey Needs’ (10 years of age). 3.00 pm: Objective achieved: 100 and out.

December 18 (Thursday).

Love, loss, and regret. They’re all one.

7.30 am: Awake (late). 8.00 am: Overcast, but without rain. Domestics: a bagging-up, putting away, and cleansing of the way, in preparation for Christmas and the arrival of my family, next week — which is one of the highlights of not only of the Season but also my life. Who I send Christmas e-cards is as good an index as any to those who are within my circle of meaningful friendships. But some on the list have now either passed, or retired and left no forwarding address, or changed their address without telling me. (‘Undeliverable’.) No ’round-robins’ this year … yet. (‘I’m not so interested in your grandchildren’.)

For me at least, this is also the season of melancholy, when an awareness of the absence of those whom I’ve loved dearly and can no longer contact, for various reasons, is felt most acutely: the ghosts of Christmas, passed. ‘Where are we now?’, asked Mr Bowie.

11.30 am: Mundane necessities: dusting and wiping, naming and organising. (In the background, I listened to the latest series of the BBC’s Uncanny. Recommended.) 1.45 pm: I moved sound files and their descriptors to the Aural Diary archive, in readiness for upload to its bespoke website. 2.45 pm: Shoppery. A somewhat forlorn-spirited town under an inert grey sky, desperately trying to feel festive. (And I remembered Bergen, Norway, in the rain.)

December 19 (Friday).

‘Some things either won’t, can’t, or shouldn’t happen in the time that remains to you. The years, resources, abilities, energy, and opportunities simply aren’t available. Therefore, prioritise wisely.

8.00 am: The start of a weekend of organisation and preparation, putting up and putting away, delegation and anticipation. A different pace and type of energy. Other voices in the house. A kitchen full of cooks, vegetable peelers, and washer-ups. There’s snow forecast. Meanwhile, rain — light, becoming hard. Blues smiled through greys.

9.45 am: ‘There’s a shadow running through my days’, sang Neil Young. (And I know its name, now.) 10.15 am: A festive snippery, with bonhomie. 11.00 am: Admin catch-up, followed by some gentle present wrapping. (The 11.27 am train to Birmingham International sounded its horn in the background.) 12.15 pm: A locally-sourced fir arrived. I’ll be brought indoors tomorrow. 1.00 pm: Correspondence with non-locally sourced friends. 2.00 pm: I outlined several easy-to-do tasks to ease my way back into work following the holiday.

Over the holidays, I plan to read the film critic David Thomson’s How to Watch a Movie (2015) and Roger C Olson’s Against Liberal Theology (2022) (for the challenge). I’ll also continue to re-read Julie Brominick’s The Edge of Cymru: A Journey (2022), which I’d last completed on a return journey from London, earlier this year. (See: March 9, Notes on London (March 7-9, 2025).) The book is stuffed with more stuff than I could get my head around on the first encounter. Julie’s descriptive ‘voice’ has, I suspect, influenced my own approach to rendering the experience of moving through the landscape. (Not that I’d ever give her the benefit of knowing that, of course. I’d never hear the end of it.)

Summa: summary (December to January 2025):

Friends lost and friends surrendered; friends reinvented and friends restored; childhood and parenthood; places discovered and places revisited; home and travel (station-to-station); silence and distance; rejoicing and tears; revelations and confessions; infirmity and recovery; dreams and fantasies; primary world (outer) and secondary world (inner); longings and disappointments; spirit and flesh; discipline and waywardness; self-sacrifice and self-indulgence; determination and defeat; remembrance and forgetting; regret and forgiveness; caution and abandon; confusion and clarity; desperation and restoration; miscommunication and accusation; storm and calm; shouts and whispers; publications and releases (words-upon-words). To be human.