Summa: diary (September 5-10, 2026)

September 5 (Saturday).

Harvest. The fruit of the earth. The yield of the vegetable patch. They’re tastier than the ones I buy at the supermarket. Really tasty … like the potatoes I ate in my childhood. (And I remembered the famine in Ireland, and my journey to the Doo Lough Valley on June 21.)

8.00 am: A full-Welsh breakfast treat at one of my favourite troughs in Aberystwyth. The seafront was to be avoided assiduously today. Our town was host to the ERC JDS Machinery Rali Ceredigion 2026. Much of my habitual ambulatory route was railed-off for reasons for safety. The event would not be my thing, even if I could drive. The only rally car I’ve ever driven was an broccoli-coloured, transfer bedecked, Austin Mini Cooper, which would speed round and shoot-off the curves on my Scalextric track, when I was a young boy. Ah! The transformer’s 50 MHz hum, and that aroma of warm, greased, electric-motor coils. The smell of Electricity.

9.00 am: A morning of housework and unexpected and inexplicable problems with several of my social-media platforms. The strategy: delete search histories, cookies, and log-in codes; delete, and either re-install or update, apps; reboot; find out whether other users are having the same problems; and write to the providers without any expectation of a response. (As proved to be the case.) By lunchtime, either I’d solved the problems or the apps had recovered of their own accord. Didn’t mind which, to be honest.

2.00 am: In the post, finally … Julie Bromincks’s new book Cader Idris: Let the Mountain Speak. It’s next on my reading list. (I peeked. ‘Oh! … .)

September 6 (Sunday).

Not all your enemies’ accusations are necessarily untrue.

The 100th release of tracks from the 144 Variations in a Theme by Joseph Parry for the Victims of Aberfan album: ‘Geoffrey Needs’. 10.00 am: Correspondence catch-up with friends afar-off. 11.00 am: Morning Eucharist.

1.45 pm: An ambulation. The way had been made straight for me along the Promenade, following the rally. I bumped into friends whom I’d not talked with for a while. They’d changed. And so had I. We’d grown, and extended our boundaries. But not together. How people evolve is often fascinating. Who wants to be a cosmological constant.

A pit-stop at my favourite watering hole. ‘Cheers!’ to the horizon, and all that lies beyond.

On my weekend evenings, I’ve been listening to podcasts on the themes of character, emotional awakenings, rupture and repair, the moral outlook, a knowledge of others, the value of friendships, and the politics of self, as part of my continuing quest to reshape the second-half of my life. I’ve also been watching films that are very familiar and comforting. I replay them in the same way as I do albums of music. Their themes, plots, and characterisations are well-known to me — but not exhaustively. (I still have ‘Ah!’ moments.) ‘Tell me that story again’, I’d beseeched my Dad when I was a toddler. There’s a peculiar pleasure in reliving the same development and resolution of a narrative, over and over again. That you know how it will end is part of the thrill. Stories aren’t information depositories.

It’s the texture, aesthetic, and formality of the films, too, that I luxuriate in. These days, I watch Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) frame-by-frame, almost. His ability to marry Hollywood with German Expressionist cinematic techniques, as well as contribute several entirely new cinematographic approaches, still astonishes me.

September 7 (Monday). 8.30 am: An appointment with two nurses at my local GP practice to receive a Doppler ultrasonographic scan on my legs. The objective was to establish the rate of water and blood flow from my heart to my feet. Everything was working within operational parameters. I suffer from ankle oedema. The problem first arose over 20 years ago when I banged my shin on an open metal filing cabinet in my office at the School of Art. (An industrial injury, of sorts.) Some doctors refuse to countenance the possibility that this could be first cause of my symptoms. Others concur with my theory. The oedema gets worse when I eat foods that I oughtn’t, but cleared-up completely during my recent stay in Ireland. The latter phenomenon remains a mystery.

I lay on my back for half-an-hour, interrogating the nurses (who’re never less than excellent, and have a practical wisdom that exceeds that of many doctors) about the process I was being subjected to, and every other complaint I could think of, for that matter. Beats Googling and AI. They possessed a human touch, and gave me answers full of compassion, humour, intelligence, experience, imaginative explanatory illustrations, and good grace.

9.30 am: I dedicated the day to self-reflection, in spite of prevailing work deadlines. In the past, the investment has been worthwhile. The decision is itself indicative that change is taking place. Listening to others who’ve engaged in the same process is enormously helpful.

As, too, our common humanity. We are all flawed, inconsistent, selfish, and capable of cruelty, self-destruction, and cowardice, and riddled with paradoxes. For example, we have the capacity to: solve other people’s problems, but not our own; point people in the right direction, while remaining lost ourselves; and show tenderness and love, without ever having being a recipient of the same.

There’ a green space close to the castle and St Michael’s Church where few people sit. It’s quiet and expansive. One of my thinking and feeling zones. Today, I could hear a gentle wind rustling the tree tops, the distant incoming tide, and the happy yelps of children in the playground close-by.

September 8 (Tuesday). 7.30 am: I travelled to Shrewsbury (the land of the Brominix and one other I knew (on whose behalf I always say ‘hello!’)) and its station. My task was to undertake field recordings and take photographs for my next project. En route, I read through and commented on doctoral documentation, in preparation for an online discussion with one of my former PhD Fine Art students, tomorrow evening.

I also responded to a Facebook recollection, by one of my former students, related to a previous blog’s discussion about PowerPoint presentations, and the British Landscape module that I taught back in the 1990s.

I remember talking with the class about Claude’s depiction of Hagar and the Angel, but without revealing the title. Then, I revealed the title and realised that nobody had heard of the biblical story. Then I read the scripture while they looked at the picture and, of course, the scales fell from their eyes.

I arrived at Shrewbury around 9.20 am. Just five years ago, anyone walking around with a pair of large ‘cans’ on their ears would’ve attracted attention. These days, no one bats an eyelid. The ‘fashion accessory’ is commonplace. That said, the ‘dead kitten’ (as the wind-shield on my microphone is referred to, professionally) did raise a few eyebrows. I must have looked like some geeky-sonic trainspotter.

Catching trains, acoustically:

What I’d not anticipated (because I’d never noticed it before) was the insistent recorded announcements that accompany every arrival and departure. ‘Shut up!’, I railed in my darker recesses, ‘I’m trying to record this engine’.

The station was otherwise relatively quiet today. Passengers didn’t talk to one another much; that’s to say, when they weren’t on their phones talking loudly to people who weren’t present. I walked the length of Platform 3, passed the plaque to Arwel Hughes and the ornamental gates through which Thomas Thomas MP didn’t walk before he didn’t die. At the South-West end, Platforms 1 and 2 were once visible, before they were closed and taken up. At the North-East end, the lines arch towards where the steam train and fifteen carriages crashed catastrophically in 1907, killing 18 passengers and crew.

Eighty years later, to the month, on October 27, 1987, I witnessed, fleetingly, the derailment of a freight train following its approach to Shrewsbury, while I was journeying from Cardiff to that station. There are times when lines connecting formerly unassociated dotes in one’s life experience are drawn.

I’ve a recording that I made on Platform 4 of Shrewsbury station in January of that year, when awaiting a connecting train to Cardiff. The ambient sounds were louder, and more complex and layered, back then: diesel engines growled as they approached, and roared as they departed. The carriages were wooden, with doors which passengers had to open and close themselves. They made a satisfying clunk when pulled shut. The announcements (about an upcoming Holyhead train arriving on Platform 2, in this instance) were made over the ‘Tannoy’ by someone who was physically present at the station. (Always a man.) Trolleys rattled their way across the platform, piled high with parcels that were loaded in the carriage, just before the guard’s van, by very vocal station hands. And the station’s cafe was not franchised by a multinational company. This was a world closer to that of Brief Encounter than to the station I haunted today.

Another world away. Two members of my family have been in Penang over the past few days. September is the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival. I attended it in 1991. Peppered around the state are stages on which Chinese opera is sung. (It’s an acquired taste.) Chairs are arranged for the audience to sit on, watch, and listen. They can park themselves anywhere expect in the front row, which is reserved for the ghosts. One performance had no seated audience. Or did it? The concept of performing to the invisible dead has gotten under my skin. There were also bonfires piled high with paper notes from the Bank of Hell in evidence. But, then again, quite a lot of that goes on in real-world banking in the west, these days.

September 9 (Wednesday).

What are the disciplines?

6.30 am: There was an academic reference to write. 8.45 am: A short ambulation and shoppery before the day’s work continued. 9.30 am: I return to the PowerPoint presentation. In the background, I listened to a podcast series about philosophy from Socrates to Sartre, and theologies of suffering and death.

1.45 pm: I’ve written a good deal about the Darkness Covered the Whole Land. The challenge is to compress that information into something that’s succinct and palatable for an audience. A spoken presentation must be apprehensible on its first hearing. The public can’t press ‘Pause’ and ‘Replay’ when listening.

September 10 (Thursday). This is World Suicide Prevention Day. I’ve known several good friends who’ve left this world at their own hands. And I’ve known as many who were brought back from the brink by the intervention of others. Some years ago, I had a 6-hour text conversation (between 9.00 pm and 3.00 am) with a student who’d told me how they would take their own life, should the necessity arise. They’d thought it through thoroughly; they had a plan, and were canvassing me for reasons why they oughtn’t to implement it. Mercifully, they’re still in the game, fulfilled, and much loved and appreciated by their family and friends.

According to statistics issued by the Samaritans:

for the first time in five years, the suicide rate in the UK has increased, with 686 more deaths than in 2017. In particular, in recent years the rate of suicide in young people has increased, and the suicide rate in young females under-25 is the now the highest on record. There has also been a significant increase in the suicide rate in young men, since 2017. Significantly more people aged 45-49 took their own lives also, and middle aged-men remain the group at greatest risk of suicide overall.

Other countries have experienced an even more alarming increase, especially among men.

11.00 am: I had coffee with Amanda, Phoebe’s mum. (I’ll be talking with Margaret, Stephen’s mum, next week.)

Amanda told me a story about the Aberfan disaster that I’d not heard before. When news of the tragedy spread abroad, collieries in the area sounded their hooters in unison and sympathy. This collective howl of lament would have been heard up and down the valley. ‘Rachel weeping for her children’ (Jeremiah 31.15).

In Memoriam: Phoebe, Sarah, and Stephen.

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