Summa: diary (September 12-18, 2026)

September 12 (Saturday).

‘This is what nobody will ever tell you’ (YouTube teaser).

According to social media, there’s a great deal we’re concealing from one another about so many thing, including: avoidant attachment; taking statins after 60; religious trauma; how to recognise a narcissist; how to cure limerence, painlessly; 5 brutal truths about ageing; why people dislike you; why you’re not important; channelling aliens; and ways to vet the person you’re dating. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

8.30 am: An ambulation and a shoppery. The sea was unsettled. Clouds threatened rain. It was windy, but without being cold. Many of my fellow walkers and runners along the Promenade were ‘coated-up’. Autumn is now established. 9.00 am: There were few in the supermarket for this time on a Saturday. More staff than customers. More carrots than asparagus.

Throughout my years, and particularly during the past two decades, I’ve been enriched by the presence of women in my life. Collectively, they’ve been between thirty and eighty years of age, for the most part: members of my family, former students, former colleagues, and a few on the periphery of my world who look-in occasionally. To a woman, they’re firm, warm, caring, humorous, very able, and intuitive. (A few are less self-confident than they deserve to be.) All contribute healing, gravitas, balance, and grounded commonsense to the friendship. Most, I see very irregularly. A handful are occasional coffee-mates. And some, either on-screen or text-based correspondents only these days. Needs must. But I’m grateful for them all. A number are no longer in this world. But we still talk. One is entirely fictional — formless and nameless — a composite of aspects derived from the others, yet nonetheless wise and gentle in her own right.

11.00 am: And it rained. And it was good to see again ‘the green, green grass of home’, after months of sunshine and drought. Ice cold water to a parched throat.

September 14 (Monday).

Don’t ignore these (YouTube teaser).

Strange dreams: discovering old photographs of me standing somewhere that I’d never been; having my portrait painted to look like a much younger version of myself; losing luggage while travelling (again); being driven, along with two people whom I know well, to attend an interview for an undisclosed job that I was sure to be offered; and riding in the front passenger seat of a bus, while it negotiated the precipitous decline of a rain-washed dirt track. I ignore my dreams. Not one has ever provided the least bit of illumination or direction. At best they’re shards of inchoate thoughts on the cutting-room floor.

A cold combined with the side effects of antibiotics have made my mind and body sluggish. 7.15 am: Writing. Having more-or-less completed the presentation for the Aberfan project, I looked to develop promotional material in anticipation of the launch of the second album on October 21 (the 60th anniversary). I’ve not yet reviewed the recordings that made over the past few weeks for the ‘Platform 3’ [working title] project. It’s still at a rudimentary stage, and will require more solidity and substance before I can apply for funding.

On with correspondence. Much chivvying of institutions continued. There are too few people running the world these days. ‘Moribund’; that’s the word. I don’t apportion blame to anyone; this is the zeitgeist — a collective ‘depression’ that we cannot easily shake off. Inertia, hopelessness, and meaningless get a foothold too easily. This is where a well-established discipline can help: the exercise of duty, commitment, resolve, and action in the face of every inclination to the contrary.

11.30 am: An hour with the artist Wayne Summers. It’s always cathartic to mutually off-load our dismay over the world at large. His level-headedness and honesty have always been a balm.

September 15 (Tuesday). 6.30 am: Darker mornings have begun. A communion. 7.15 pm: Breakfast and fresh air; last night’s gentle rain had stopped. 8.00 am: I began writing the Darkness Covered the Whole Land album’s propaganda. There’s nothing I find so uncomfortable as blowing my own trumpet. (In the background played: Peter Gabriel 1: Car (1977). (An associative connection with the photograph below, taken earlier.)

9.45 am: For some time, I’ve been unconvinced by the ‘illustrations’ attached to the 16 compositions on the Darkness album. They remain too literal and raw, in spite of extensive collaging and randomisation. I subjected the original artworks to the RAW-conversion glitch-process responsible for the 144 images and cover featured on the 144 Variations album. When applied to the artworks for the Darkness album, the transformations look like old school blackboards on which scenes of the village and the disaster had been drawn in white chalk, and then partially erased.

September 16 (Wednesday).

‘Taking the pain out of painting’ (Spotify advertisement).

You do so at your peril. Remove the anguish, insecurity, and strain from any creative practice, and what you end up with is safe, predictable, and effete. Pain acknowledges the level of ambition and the attendant difficulty in essaying anything worthwhile. 8.30 am: Correspondence, and a return to propagandising until lunchtime. 1.45 pm: On, again, with the revision of the 16 ‘illustrations’ for the Darkness album’s tracks. Some have assumed rather Klee-like quality.

6.00 pm: A family celebration in the evening at my favourite (and the only) Mediterranean/Arabic restaurant in town. I choose Welsh Lamb Kofta (almost always).

September 17 (Thursday).

‘Most people don’t do this’ (Instagram teaser).

And with good reason. 7.15 am: Correspondence. 8.45 am: A communion. 9.15 am: A review of the week’s work before returning to writing. Ideally, I’d like the draft promotional material in the bag and dispatched by the close of today. Then, there’ll be an end to accounting … for now. 1.45 pm: Further adjustments to the draft propaganda and a review of the 16 ‘illustrations’, made yesterday.

The Shadow Vale series (above) — a title that alludes, simultaneously, to the King James Version (1611) and Scottish Psalter (1564) translations of Psalm 23.4 — cast my mind back to a small drawing I made 44 years ago, entitled Dark Valley. The image was conceived on a nighttime bus journey from Newport, Gwent to my home town of Abertillery. There are times when our past shapes our present.

This is not a mind game. It happened today:

7.00 pm: I attended an interview, held at a local bookshop, with the author, educator, environmentalist, walker, travel writer, and my friend Julie Brominicks about her latest book: Cader Idris: Let the Mountain Speak.

Julie writes about landscape and its elements as though she was encountering them for the first time. And in such a way as a child could grasp. (That’s a great gift.) She invites us to see the mountain through not only her eyes but also her body — drenched, wind-swept, bruised, and cold. Now, this is commitment. Her vivid pictorial imagination transforms Cader Idris into an enchanted place, where the past, magic, and invisible forces coalesce. On this mountain, she has discovered histories where (to anyone else, perhaps) there are no histories to be found. I thought of Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c.1830-32). While she, like Hokusai, encountered a mountain in different weathers and seasons, her multiple perspectives were not drawn from divergent and remote vantage points, but seen through the eyes and lives of those who work on and around Cader.

As she read passages from her new book, I was reminded of Paul Simon’s road song America (1968). One writer remarked that Simon’s lyric demonstrated a remarkable ability to combine broad-sweep evocations of the panoramas he’d viewed from the Greyhound bus (in which he was travelling with a companion) with descriptions of incidents seen within:

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field.

Julie’s new work manifests the same ability to move from one focal length to another, effortlessly.

September 18 (Friday).

‘You can’t unsee this!’ (YouTube teaser).

Try me. 6.30 am: Writing and reflection. Writing is the first thing I do after my ablutions. It serves to gather myself: thoughts, focus, energies, and resolve. 8.30 am: I reviewed the online texts accompanying the two Aberfan project albums. There may be a collaborative side-project in the offing. It will force me into territory that’s far from where I am presently and will be with the next planned project. Such an opportunity should be embraced with enthusiasm.

11.30 am: After acclimatising to a new sound-recording app, I extracted the files I’d made at Shrewbury station on September 8. I’m reluctant to engage with them yet. To do so would draw me into a different world too quickly.

There was, in any case, a batch of unprocessed audio files to finalise before they’re uploaded to the Studium and Aural Diary archives. This is small fry, but I have to keep on top of it. ‘Practical Housekeeping’, my Dad’s magazine called it.

I put down a marker:

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