Summa: diary (March 6-13, 2026)

‘But the end is not yet’ (Matthew 24.6).

March 6 (Friday). Aberystwyth to Milton Keynes. 9.30 am: ‘The off’ (as they say in horse racing).

A second consecutive weekend away (which is unusual for me), visiting my younger son and daughter-in-law at her parents’ home in Milton Keynes. I told a friend I was going there. She responded, in dismay: ‘But why?’ Pete Waterman’s World Record Model Railway Exhibition, which I visited in October last year, included what proved to be a life-like representation of Milton Keynes Central station. There’s an undeniable blandness to the city that’s at one and the same time dispiriting and winning. It’s like walking into a town planner’s pre-visualisation.

En route, I continued writing-up my notes for the track descriptors. My albums’ accompanying commentaries may appear excessive to some. (Although, audients aren’t obliged to read them.) As a full-time academic, I was compelled to submit a comprehensive account of the structure, content, aims, objectives, outcomes, and impact of every research project produced. These were the metrics of the measure of quality. (Said some.) No doubt my current practice reflects that indoctrination. Nevertheless, I remain convinced that some form of description and contextualisation of this current endeavour’s intent and design will be helpful to the listener (and me). I despair of artists who accompany their work with only the names of the maker, the album, and the tracks, without either an introduction to what I’m about to hear or a list of instrumentation.

1.30 pm: Arrived. I’ve not seen her family since their visit to Aberystwyth last Summer. We enjoyed a lovely evening of good home cooking and conversation. My daughter-in-law and her parents are from Kerala, India, and adhere to the Syriac Christian tradition — which fuses Protestant Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox beliefs. (Me … I’m essentially a Welsh Nonconformist who appreciates Anglican liturgy.) They’ve a crucifix and several crosses on the walls of the house. Food is eaten with the hands (as I’d expected). It looks fundamental, ancient, and earthy. While I’d happily devour KFC and fish and chips using this technique, I wasn’t yet confident to take on curry and rice, without the risk of major spillage and dry-cleaning bills.

March 7 (Saturday). 9.30 am: A trip to Bletchley Park. Once upon a time, the train from Aberystwyth to Euston used to stop at the station, which is some 50 miles north of the Capital. I’ve wanted to visit for many years. Here, during the Second World War, the cipher for the Enigma code was broken by luminaries such as Alan Turing. Anyone familiar with my visual art projects in The Pictorial Bible series will appreciate that coding and translation are of the works’ essence.

Machines for typing, too, were a preoccupation of mine from the late-1970s to the mid-1980s. The Enigma machine is an exquisite piece of mechanical and electrical engineering. It was designed and built by Siemens, who also used forced labour from the concentration camps to aid the German war effort. My daughter-in-law’s father works for the company. It has a very different ethic these days. However, conversation about the war is prohibited among the staff I’m told.

Bletchley Park was, too, where the digital world of computation emerged from the analogue. A pivotal period of remarkable achievements in intelligence gathering, problem solving, and technology, by any standard. I rediscovered my passion for toggle switches. ‘Build a switchboard, John!’, the inner-tutor urged. ‘And only afterwards assign a purpose to it’. This was radical thinking on his part.

March 9 (Monday). Aberystwyth. 7.45 am: Tidying away belongings after the weekend, and setting out my stall for the working-week ahead. 8.30 am: Studyology. Having completed the first draft of all the track descriptors on my travels, I set aside the day to begin finalising the text.

1.30 am: An ambulation and shoppery. On returning home through the municipal cemetery, I heard the sound of an electric leaf-blower being wielded by a groundskeeper along the path. My instinct, invariably, is, first, to hum the same note and, then, a note above or below it.

2.15 pm: I returned to writing. In the background, albums by the folk-rock group Fairport Convention and solo work by the remarkable folk-rock fiddler and violinist, Dave Swarbrick, played. He flew this world in 2016, from the hospital which I can presently see out of my study window.

March 10 (Tuesday).

That little boy, having gone on a long journey, now wanted to come home.

7.45 am: An ambulation on a flat sort of day. ‘No colour; no contrast’, Joni sang. I couldn’t ‘see’ the landscape. Which made me appreciate all the more those days when I could. My inner conversations were stifled. No melancholy; no sadness. Just a blank sheet of paper waiting to be filled.

9.15 am: Studyology. Writing and a review of yesterday’s work. Clunkiness persists in places, and facts needed to be checked for the umpteenth time. Thereafter, a bespoke website and an online streamed site will be developed, the accompanying artwork created, the introductory text translated into Welsh, tracks mastered, and funding sought. In the background, I streamed music from the 1950s to 1980s through hearing aids. My focus was on the evolution of stereophony over that period, in relation to love songs and ballads specifically. Early stereo was winningly crude. For example: instruments on the left, vocalists on the right, with nothing at the centre. It’s profoundly uncomfortable to listen to over headphones.

1.45 pm: I final read of the track descriptors before reacquainting myself with the text for the album’s introductory text.

March 11 (Wednesday). 8.00 am: A glorious, if cold, morning. An ambulation though town and along the Promenade. Many roadworks were in evidence, as the council desperately spends the remains of its budget before the start of the new financial year. I returned home via the pharmacy for the second time this week. I informed the woman behind the counter that I would join the local Park Run before I next picked up my next prescription. It’s good to lay down a marker and announce a commitment of intent. She will hold me to it, I’m confident.

9.15 am: Studyology. A review of yesterday’s writing. The introductory text required an explanation of its accompanying images. 11.00 am: Tea at the Arts Centre with Saoirse Morgan, who toured me around one of the latest exhibitions: Sam Vicary & Catrin Llywd: Still Worlds. Familiar experiences. Personal Visions. Simple propositions.

12.00 pm: Back at home, I finalised the explanation, while mapping the rationale for the album’s front-cover image. It’s an articulation and codification of verses 3 to 6 of Psalm 144:

Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away. Bow thy heavens, O Lord, and come down: touch the mountains, and they shall smoke. Cast forth lightning, and scatter … .

Psalm 144.4-6.

The first 144 letters of the verses are poured into a 12 × 12 grid (which will be in a 4:3 format, in the final version). Each of the 22 different letters of the alphabet represented by the text will be assigned a value taken from a 22-tone achromatic scale with a blue-grey cast (characteristic of black and white TVs in the 1960s).

(Pete Hegseth, United States Secretary of War, quoted the first few verses of the psalm at the close of one of his briefings on the Iran war.)

March 12 (Thursday).

‘Invest today’s capital, John! And return it to your Maker with interest.’

7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Studyology. Writing. 9.00 am: Studiology. An inventory of the instruments used on the album was drawn-up. This will contribute to the ‘cover’ information. It’s part of an album’s ‘bibliography’, in my view. The task was tedious. On this occasion, I also drew-up a definitive equipment manifest, so that I can more easily extract relevant items for future projects.

12.30 pm: A time to reflect upon those things to which my heart and mind gravitate in moments of reverie, fantasies, and dreams. By ‘things’, I don’t mean possessions. Rather, they’re ambitions that don’t declare themselves to be such, but persist nevertheless. Desires in denial: those things that I’ve told myself many times I don’t either want or need, and would regret. But, I suspect, the very opposite is true.

2.30 pm: Having returned from a blustery and rainy trip to town, I turned to the album cover’s image, constructed a cell (derived from a TV test card), and began assigning the 22 tones of the achromatic scale. Black and white TVs in the 1960s had an 8-division scale to enable technicians to calibrate the screen.

March 13 (Friday). 30th anniversary of the Dunblane massacre. In 1996, 16 children and 1 teacher were killed by a gunman in a small town in Stirling, Scotland. The massacre was the worst fatality involving a significant number of children in the UK since the Aberfan disaster, 30 years earlier.

7.15 am: Correspondence. 9.30 am: Following a brief ambulation to the Post Office I wrote, before picking-up where I left off yesterday afternoon. 10.00 am: Studiology. It took an hour to complete the 22-toned cells in readiness for insertion into the text grid (above). 1.00 pm: The grid was complete.

Rather than assume this was the only possible expression of the idea, I determined to construct an alternative, based on micro-samples derived from the digital photographic images made for the 144 Variations album.

3.45 pm: An ambulation to the Avenue in the sunshine, returning under dark clouds, and against the gathering wind. ‘Get me home before the rain breaks’. It felt like November. Dark, bare trees. But their buds were clearly visible. In their own time, not mine.

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