Summa: diary (February 14-20, 2026)

February 14 (Saturday). ‘Be my Valentine!, birthday girl’. Love, in absentia.

7.00 am: 1°C. An ambulation, with hands in pockets and my coat-collar turned up. I could count the number of passers-by on one hand. The frosted sand, which had been thrown-up onto the Promenade, crumpled like snow beneath my feet. Sky and sea, crimson and turquoise, embraced like lovers. ‘I’m alive!’ And that was enough, on a day like this.

9.00 am: The morning and afternoon were set aside for dusting, brushing, wiping, and vacuuming my studio and study. It had to be done. And it will need to be done, again and again. Like brushing my teeth; like cutting my nails and hair. My mother had a reputation for being an incessant cleaner. Our small terrace house was always ‘spick and span’. She wasn’t house proud, but wanted the home to look its best for family and visitors. The care was a manifestation of her love, in this respect. Her mother scrubbed the doorsteps of a local colliery owner’s house.

February 15 (Sunday). 8.30 am: On walking into the darkened lounge of my home, I was greeted by the sweet odour of flowers, arranged in a vase on the coffee table. I stood motionless for some time — looking towards the closed curtains and listening to the rain on the window. The experience summoned no reminiscence. This was something in and of itself; a memory in the making. It’ll be recalled, every time I shall either smell cut flowers or think of love and loss in unison.

3.15: After the rain: many mirrors.

February 16 (Monday). 7.30 am: A communion and reflection on friends, family, and the week ahead. 8.30 am: Studiology. I re-engaged ‘The Fall’. The track that followed it still sounded thin. There was nothing amiss with what was there; it’s what was not there that galled. (As I’ve stated elsewhere in my blogs, mixing can be the final stage of composition also.) There were sonorities and a narrative that required further emphasis. ‘You can do better than this, John!’ the inner-tutor remonstrated. I would return to this composition at the close of the album’s mix. 10.45 pm: Meanwhile, on with ‘Bethania’. Ruthless excisions continued.

12.00 pm: On with numbers 11 and 12. Every time I return to a track, I discern, not so much its weaknesses as, the limitations of its reach. Either the snow dome needed to be shaken vigorously or the vase, broken into pieces and reassembled. Such re-encounters also force new possibilities and potential refinements into the light, which invariably edge the work towards betterment.

7.30 pm: Eventide. I pressed on — hesitating and stumbling — with the track texts.

February 17 (Shrove Tuesday). Chinese New Year. 祝你马年幸福安康! [May your year of the Horse be full of happiness and health!]

8.00 am: Studiology. I dealt with computery problems, if not to not solve, then, to diagnose. 8.30 am: Back on track, as it were, with ‘Hymn: You Could Hear the Hymn Singing’. Formally, it’s the simplest of all the compositions, comprising the sound of a wordless, unknown hymn sung by a male-voice choir, heard at a distance as it ebbed and flowed on the wind. There was no wind on the day of the mass funeral, and the two well-known hymns were sung, congregationally, by women, men, and children. However, the reality just didn’t cut, emotionally speaking.

Track 14: ‘Jimi Kissed the Ground’. ‘Reduce, John! Reduce!’, implored the inner-tutor. ‘Make what is there do more’. Very often, when I’ve been engaged with simplest form of a previous track, I hear more clearly the excess baggage carried by which ever one I’m currently working on. ‘Re-make/Re-model’, as the old Roxy Music song goes. 11.30 am: I’d stripped away everything from track 14, other than the sounds made by an electric guitar.

Track 15: ‘Who Sinned?’ Something was still missing. ‘One thing is needful’, as John Wesley wrote in the condensation on a host’s window. But what? The answer often lies in the sound culture of the composition’s context. Here, it references the tribunal held following the disaster at Merthyr College of Education. This lasted 76 days, involved 136 witnesses, and heard 2,500,000 words of testimony. In my mind’s ear, I heard a judge’s gavel.

3.00 pm: I visited Susan Forster’s studio to discuss her work, which is currently based on tension, suspension, containment, and much else besides. The tutorial was well-oiled with Welsh cakes and homemade delicacies. We’ve known one another long enough to jump into the deep water from the get go.

February 17 (Ash Wednesday). The beginning of Lent.

7.30 am: A communion. 8.00 am: Studylogy. Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I carried on with the penultimate track: adding the gavel; tightening the transitions; and working-in the new material, in accordance with a logic revealed by the work itself. 11.00 am: Charles Ives’s composition Central Park in the Dark (1906) always reassures me that disparate and discontinuous melodic lines can be reconciled, even though they appear to conflict in a composition. I added a bass figure to ‘Who Sinned?’, derived from a reconfiguration of the hymn ‘Loving Shepherd of Thy Sheep’. It had been played on piano, lowered an octave, and slowed down by 40%. It sounds like an ensemble of tuned timpani. So, it turned out, two things (not one) were needful: a gavel and a ‘timp’. A surreal encounter.

1.30 pm: A shoppery, fought against the blistering winds. 3.30 pm: On to the final composition: ‘Hymn: That Sadness Remained for a Long Time (1966-2026)’. This is the only track on the album that’s guaranteed to put a lump in my throat; the only one that features an intelligible voice — of a witness to the disaster (whom I’d recorded in the course of an interview, on July 4, 1989). 7.30 pm: I continued writing the track texts.

February 19 (Thursday). And there’s me thinking that Diego Garcia was a footballer. 8.30 am: Studiology. The source of the material means of composition for the last track is a well-worn 78-rpm shellac record, on which the sound is severely corrupted. The music had to be excavated from the grooves, using techniques deployed by sound restorers. Like picture restoration, the work proceeds, painstakingly slowly, on a very small scale, several millimeters (of time measured on the sound-graphic scale) at a time. It’s a process of recovery that’s apposite in the context of this project — rescuing what was buried. As in life, not all wounds can be healed. Moreover, I don’t want to present a polished version of the original. The imperfections are an intrinsic part of the sound’s present character, and a testament to its age and endurance over time. Resist the temptation to restore arms to the Venus de Milo, therefore.

11.00 am: Three strands of the session framework were now complete. I needed to combine two only. Meshing them would prove to be an exacting discussion. This would be my quarry for the remainder of the morning and afternoon. 7.30 pm: Rather than return to writing, I maintained my present course while opening-up further the Left > Right stereo-field of the mix. ‘Let the air flow’. Things began to change.

February 19 (Friday). 8.00 am: Reflection and writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. I reviewed last night’s progress on the final track, listening, first, at very low volume and, then, around 40 dB. Disparities in loudness across the length of the track were identified. Thereafter, I began re-inserted and re-equalised samples of the witness’s testimony. How slow things go.

‘And this was children’, the witness exclaimed, still shaking her head in exasperation after all those years. Other coal mining disasters had cost far more lives. But they were of adult men, for the greater part, who’d descended the mine voluntarily and in full-cognisance that they might perish in a moment and without notice following an explosion or a roof-fall. They were ‘acceptable’ casualties; the collateral damage of industry. But children weren’t colliers, and their school wasn’t a pit. It should’ve been a place of safekeeping, from which they were guaranteed to return home. ‘And this was children’. It’s a sentiment that I’ve heard spoken in outrage many times during the past fortnight in relation to Jeffrey Epstein’s atrocities, too.

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