Summa: diary (March 1-6, 2026)
March 1 (Sunday). St David’s Day (Cardiff). 9.15 am: Proof of presence.
I was in Cardiff for the weekend, as the guest of two friends from Aberystwyth, who’d moved to the city a decade ago. The husband is a retired academic and his wife, a retired GP and Senior Lecturer in medicine. I was on a reconnoitre. On arrival, Friday afternoon, I toured residential areas in the vicinity, which I knew — vaguely — from my two non-consecutive years living in Cardiff in the mid-1980s. Saturday morning, the city centre beckoned. My tradition is to weave in and out the arcades from the top to the bottom of St Mary Street. I very rarely buy anything. The pleasure is in passing the shops and cafes. I called in at St John the Baptist Church — notably, the only medieval building in the city.
1.30 pm: On, then, by train to Penarth — which I’ve visited only once. But that was so long ago, I may as well not have visited it at all. I remember nothing. The sun was out and the pier, resplendent. In the Bristol Channel I could see the Welsh islands of Flat Holm and Steep Holm. From the former, Marconi sent the first wireless communication in 1867.
Today, Sunday, I attended the morning service of Eucharist at St Edward’s Church (of the Confessor fame), Roath. It has a small and committed congregation. The church punches far above its weight when it comes to hosting concerts. Several pews in front of me sat a young man and his carer. He was a paraplegic with a host of other physical challenges. The young woman who accompanied him tended to his needs with evident love and affection, moment-by-moment. Touching and impressive.
1.15 pm: I’d been looking forward to the Gwen John: Strange Beauties exhibition at the National Museum Cardiff. Her work first captured my heart when I was a Foundation Course student at Newport, Gwent (just over 12 miles (20 km) away) in the late 1970s. Then, I’d made frequent visits to the collection. The exhibition drew attention to John’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, and the underlying and self-consciously spiritual orientation of her work. (Her identity as a Welsh artist was, mercifully, not a major topic in the conversation.) She described herself as ‘God’s instrument’. Gwen John’s outlook was tutored by the teachings of St Thérèse of Lisieux, who taught a theological practice called the ‘little way’. It parallels St David’s admonition to ‘do the small things’. John’s work is quintessentially about the wonder that inhabits those incidental visual phenomena which can easily go unnoticed, and yet are imbued with a quiet grandeur (wherein is God). And boy, could she draw hands!
En route into town from the museum, I noticed this ‘wayside shrine’ dedicated to those who had gone through homelessness and died on the streets on Cardiff.
In the evening, I leafed through a contemporary edition of Gray’s Anatomy (first published in 1858), while sat next to my GP friend, who’d studied anatomy and attended postmortems when she was training in London. It was so helpful to have an informed running commentary, annotating my reading. ‘We are fearfully and wonderfully made’, we both concluded.
March 2 (Monday). 10.00 am: A stroll alongside Roath Park lake. This was a place of consolation, where I walked and talked to myself and God in the mid-1980s about life, love, and the future. 11.00 am: On, then, to several other residential areas before returning to Aberystwyth.
March 3 (Tuesday). 8.00 am: An ambulation to see the sea. I’d missed ‘her’. She was rumbustious and teasingly playful this morning. 9.00 am: Studiology. Writing and correspondence.
10.00 am: Studiology. A review of last week’s work on the sound mix and track descriptors. Track 3 needed attention. Three short reversed loops, derived from a 78-rpm recording of a church choir singing ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’, were added. Sonically and intellectually, they felt appropriate. However, I’ve not yet been able to explain to myself why this is so. 4.00 pm: I took up the reigns of the next two compositions, in order to extract information for the text descriptors.
March 4 (Wednesday). Dismal dreams. In the first, I was charged with organising an art exam for 16-year old students, but couldn’t find the ream of new A2 drawing paper. In the second, a toxic family member turned up after several decade’s absence. No one knew what to say to them. The tenor of dreams I find hard to shake off.
7.45 am: An ambulation. My working hypothesis is that it’s now Spring — or as close as damn it. Children were arriving, either solo or with parents, at the school on the avenue. I’ve fond memories of the time when my own children did the same.
8.30 am: Studyology. Medical correspondence and a review of yesterday’s writing. 9.30 am: Studiology. I listened again to yesterday’s sound mix too. On to the sixth track: ‘Let Me Tell You About My Dream Last Night (October 20, 1966)’ — Eryl Mai Jones’s premonitory vision of the disaster, in which she was killed. Some dreams have colossal and immediate import in the waking world.
11.00 am: A visit to my audiologist to receive the latest and more sophisticated buds for my artificial ears. 12.00 pm: Back tracking, as it were. Tracks 8 and 9 are two complimentary perspectives (the one heavenly, the other earthly) on the same event: the rescue of the victims from the watery spoil. The former summons angelic singing. It was inspired by the image on a calendar for 1911 and 1912 given to patrons by a butcher’s shop in Aberfan.
I pushed on, uphill, with further tracks, conscious that I was willing the project to its conclusion. This album (and the other) have taken far longer than I’d anticipated. I’m eager to move on to other media and orientations. Since 2015, I will have released 9 albums (including a double album) in The Aural Bible series, as well as other sound projects beside. That’s almost one release every year for over a decade. Yet, there are other other challenges in sound that I’ve failed conspicuously to overcome; they continue to draw me to themselves. And there are things I no longer do, which I now miss. Inner-necessity beckons.
March 5 (Thursday). 8.00 am: Studylogy. Writing. 8.30 am: Tracks 13 and 14, a little DIY repair on a curtain cord, and preparations for another weekend away. 9.30 am: Tracks 15 and 16. 11.30 am: Complete. It remains for me to cast the notes into intelligible sentences.
11.00 am: Off to the School of Art to view Wayne Summers’s PhD Candidate Exhibition, Palimpsest. I strongly suspect that this will be the first of several visits to the gallery. Before my retirement, I was his supervisor. It’s gratifying to see this conclusion (and, I suspect, there could’ve be many alternative endings besides) t0 the practice-based element of Wayne’s doctoral studies.
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