Summa: dairy (June 8-13, 2026)
There are no new beginnings, only evolutions.
June 8 (Monday). A weekend of domestic duties; ambulating; cleaning my studio and study; eating something I shouldn’t have (and suffering); planning a time away; remembering friends, whom I’m unlikely to ever see again; telephoning my sons; and contemplating change (and its necessity), as well as things, people, and places to come.
5.30 am: I caught up on the weekend’s correspondence and reflected on the working week ahead. 7.30 am: The indicative content of the book beckoned. Prevarication is at my elbow. In academic writing, it’s inadvisable to be vague; the logic of how one theme and chapter dovetail into others needs to be made clear and persuasive.
As an undergraduate, I was taught how to write a dissertation by the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke. She had a method for allocating ideas to themes. Gillian called it the ‘six-stones’. On her desk, she would arrange half-a-dozen stones. Each was assigned a theme or topic. As an idea came to her, she’d write it down on a small piece of paper and place it under the stone most appropriate to the content. As more and more ideas were conceived and allocated, the bundles of paper grew beneath the stones. By the end of the exercise, she had the equivalent of six reasonably-defined sections, each with a productive set of associated ideas. I use the method still, to kick-start writing projects.
2.00 pm: Having got further than I’d envisaged with the book’s indicative content, I began writing the introduction to the PowerPoint presentation that nobody has asked for … yet. Begin something and you’re half way there to completing it, as they say.
9.00 pm: Evensong.
June 9 (Tuesday). 5.30 am: Studylogy. A review of yesterday’s writing. 7.30 am: Breakfast, as the curtains were drawn and sunshine brought the new day into an old home — as it has done for over 180 years.
8.00 am: I furthered the indicative content file, and forced my brain to subdivide and extend existing ideas, as well as add new ones. ‘REMEMBER: This is only indicative; it’s provisional. No one is going to hold you to it, “Bounty Boy”‘, chastened the inner-tutor. This was one of several tasks that needed to be substantially finished before my Summer vacation began. And there were others that I wanted ‘ready to go’ on my return.
My ‘stones’, and the stack of ideas beneath them, changed quickly. Much shuffling. ‘Let go of preconceptions, John. Let the work dictate’, admonished the inner-tutor. Inevitably, there are some ideas that (as yet) appear not to fit under any stone. They’re like jigsaw pieces from an entirely different box.
1.30 pm: An ambulation to purchase XTRA-large eggs. (But I forget to buy the more necessary milk.) (Sigh!) 2.00 pm: Back on the job, growing the spoken text and PowerPoint presentation in parallel. (This is an ideal state of affairs.)
June 10 (Wednesday). 5.30 am. The release of ‘Robert Breeze’.
8.00 am: Studyology. A little picture research; a review of the indicative content document and the presentation text; a reckoning on what I’m not facing-up to, presently; chasing overdue replies to last week’s outgoing correspondence; and making adjustments to my will. (Doing so doesn’t bring death any nearer than it already is.)
10.00 am: A few slices of bread washed up on the shore. I’ve struck-up a dialogue with the designer at the CD production company that I hope to use. My approach is to undertake as much of the design work as I can. It’s not that I don’t trust the designer to a good job. They’re very able. But I have a clear idea of what I want. And I need to minimise costs, wherever possible.
1.30 pm: A trip to town to buy the milk that I’d forgotten yesterday. 2.00 pm: I redesigned the holding cover for the 144 Variations album on my Sound site. Eventually, the title will be bilingual. All my kites are now flying. I just need to keep hold of the strings.
June 11 (Thursday). 6.30 am: Rainfall. Percussion without rhythm. Attack; no decay. Rain on the panes of windows in confined spaces sounds like many small drumsticks playing on the surface of a snare. In more capacious areas (like my stairwell), the sound recalls a tunable tin drum. 9.00 am: An ambulation towards the hairdresser, where I talked a great deal. Rarely, these days, am I asked: ‘Doing anything nice this weekend?’ And certainly never: ‘Something for the weekend, sir?’ (‘Something’ was a euphemism for condoms, in my youth.)
11.20 am: An appointment with my solicitor to sign ‘THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF JOHN HARVEY’. Sobering, inevitable, and final. On leaving, I wondered: ‘Should I swing-by the Funeral Director, and rifle through their coffin catalogue?’
12.00 pm: A commute back-and-fore the study and the studio, working on documents and loudness equalisation. I generated a Word document, and titled it: ‘The Aural Bible X: book project’. Now I have a blank ‘sheet’, ready to be filled with ideas. The overarching intent is to produce a streamed album focused upon the sounds referred to in the Bible — to accompany my book on the same topic. It would be fitting for the final and tenth album release in The Aural Bible series to be, quite literally, an aural bible — that is to say, a bible made of sound only. The idea may look good on ‘paper’, but … . After my vacation, I shall begin reading the Bible from cover-to-cover once again. (This will be my fourth run-through in two years.) It’s a mode of total immersion, in preparation for both book writing and sound composition.
7.30 pm: I responded to an enquiry seeking further information about the Aberfan project’s two albums.
June 12 (Friday).
The evil that men do (William Skakespeare, Julius Ceasar (1599)).
Now, it’s dark (David Lynch, Blue Velvet (1986)).
6.00 am: A review of this blog. 8.00 am: A mist had settled on the hill tops, a gentle chill wind gathered, and a grey cloud bank obscured the sun. A premonitory of Autumn to come.
This would be my last day of work before the holidays. In junior school (5-11 years of age), there’d were no formal lessons today. Instead, my classmates and I would draw and colour-in from 9 am to 3.30 pm. Now, that was education.
David Hockney’s death was announced today. He was one of those rare artists who could innovate and ‘reinvent’ himself, while taking a sizeable proportion of the general public with him. I admired most his so-called ‘classical period’, and that touching double-portrait of his parents, especially. He made it in the same year as I began my art education: 1977. Like many of his works around that time, My Parents was painted in acrylic — the medium to which I was first introduced on my foundation course. Having previously made pictures in the art department at secondary school (12-18 years of age) with only poor-quality poster colours, Rowney acrylic paint was a revelation — much in the same way that rancid butter was a revelation. (Patience, tenacity and forgiveness were required.) Hockney was an exemplary draughtsman, too. He made me want to draw.
June 13 (Saturday).
‘Stairway to heaven’. ‘Bingo!’
THERE WILL BE A DIARY SABBATICAL FROM JUNE 14-JULY 5, 2026.
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