Summa: diary (September 1-4, 2026)
September 1 (Tuesday). 7.30 am: A warm and sunny first day of meteorological autumn. The Summer’s drought has already begun to dry and discolour the leaves. I anticipate a sudden fall this year. Proof of presence.
9.30 pm: At the railway station; a fond farewell to a loved-one.
10.00 am: In my mind, I’m betwixt two projects. The Aberfan albums will conclude when I complete the uncalled-for presentation. On Friday, I’ll make the first practical step towards composing ‘Platform 3’ — the working title for the new project. Air forced though metal tubes: steam engines, church organs, and brass/silver bands. This is one of the concepts at the its core.
I’ve not prepared a PowerPoint presentation in several years. (There’s been no call.) However, the software’s menus are more or less the same as I remember. One of my bugbears, as anyone who has followed this blog for some time will appreciate, is the condition under which a ‘slide show’ (as I persist to call it) is seen. (I still refer to a radio a ‘wirelesses’.) More often than not, conference rooms and lecture theatres are insufficiently dark for the full contrast and saturation of ‘slides’ to be appreciated. There was a time when achieving optimum obscurity mattered a great deal. What has changed? As a visual artist, I find this laxity (and there’s no other word for it) dispiriting. Most people wouldn’t tolerate watching a film at the cinema other than in pitch darkness.
2.00 pm: Proof of presence.
2.30 pm: A coffee, white hot chocolate, and an overdue catch-up with the artist and educator Saoirse Morgan.
Afterwards, she invited me to visit her studio area, which is just around the corner from the cafe. Saorise showed me some of the new work she’s been making. It’s abstract in sensibility, painting- and collage-based, and deals with themes and structures derived from the coastal landscape. She shares the studio with what sounded like a host of other local artists. It smelt like an art school — the air, ‘perfumed’ with a combination of linseed oil, turpentine, and printer’s ink. Heady and comforting.
I taught Saoirse painting when she was studying for an MA Fine Art at the School of Art. This afternoon, we slipped effortlessly into tutorial mode. Not that she needs my input these days. It was indulgent nostalgia on my part.
September 2 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: An ambulation in the drizzle. God forbid that anyone should complain about rain after the last few months. The streets were relatively quiet. Parents were no doubt frantically readying children for the return to school, tomorrow. A little shoppery before home.
9.00 am: I pressed on with the presentation, at a pace. Lunch was a combination of beans on toast, French brie, and Catalan sausage (fuet). It’s my metaphor and hope for a rapprochement between the UK and the EU. The arrangement of the component parts reminded me a painting by Bernard Cohen. 1.45 pm: One of several farewells to members of my family, on WhatsApp. By this time tomorrow, four of them will be in East Asia. I’m running solo at home, presently, and find eating alone to be a sorry experience. So I take my meals into the living room, slump onto the couch, and watch Netflix documentaries on death and the paranormal, for company. ‘It’s research!’, I tell myself.
September 3 (Thursday). 6.45 am: Back at my desk, pushing on. 11.00 am: An ambulation. I stepped out onto the crisp golden carpet that had been laid overnight. And I remembered Ophelia. (See: Diary (September 4, 2018)).
I’m working a 12-hour day, pushing the presentation forward fiercely. My PowerPoint files are known for their abundance of slides. ‘Too many, John!’ I say: they have neither more nor less than are required. Moreover, I’ve suffered too may academic presentations where the presenter has hung their discussion on a single slide for over 15 minutes. Whereas the content of what was said could have been illuminated by a half-a-dozen more, easily. The PowerPoint, in my opinion, is a visual essay that runs parallel, and is complementary, to the spoken text.
September 4 (Friday). 10.30 am: Off to Eglwys Llanbadarn [Llanbadarn Church], to meet my friend Daniel Smith. (He’s a church organist and also a Lego enthusiast.] We were going to record Arwel Hughes’s hymn tune Tydi a Roddaist on the organ. The church’s interiors walls are plastered. This provides a consistent reflective surface from the transept (where the organ is situated) through to the nave. The sound of the instrument is a collaboration with the context in which it has been placed.
Daniel played the tune a number of times, while I recorded him at different distances from the organ using two separate microphones. Our principal task was to capture the tune, one bar at a time. He would play a bar, then, pause — as we witnessed the notes decay — then play another, and so on. For a man who’s a passionate about Lego, the concept of playing music bar-by-bar (‘brick’-by-‘brick’) was grasped straightforwardly. Each bar contained the essence of the whole. It was like slowing down time. The process afforded him the opportunity to consider the ‘bricks’ in spacial and acoustic isolation, one from another.
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