How now! who knocks? More earthquakes? (John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi).

7.15 am: Mist. Moist. Tightly enclosed. Darkness, still bearing down. Life lived as though in a picture book:

This week has had little to commend itself, thus far. 8.00 am: A responsive email was the first priority of the day. I was resigned to dealing with the earthquakes as and when they came. 8.30 am: The painter and decorator arrived. Unlike most workmen, he doesn’t take four teaspoons of sugar in his tea. But he does like his tea weak – like only wave the teabag in front of the milky hot water, weak. 9.00 am: I looked over yesterday’s ‘formathon’, and made small adjustments for the sake of consistency. (In the background: Keith Jarrett’s Vienna Concert (1992).)

11.00 am: I lurched from one unwelcome and irksome task to another. My Post-it ‘washing-line’ has now extended to the base of my second computer monitor. After lunch, I needed to ‘get physical’, having stared-out my computer screens for too long over the past three days. I picked up my ‘studio’ Post-it and headed for the amplifiers. The PA was at the top of my mental list. A thorough workout, in order to test the system, was long overdue. This was playtime:

2.00 pm: A final determination of marks for the Abstraction module. This took an age. The mist had become a static; the world, almost completely erased. I caught up with my register of third year painting tutees. This semester, without an art history module punctuating my tutorials, I could dedicate the whole of Thursday to one thing only – which is how I prefer to teach. ‘More tea, please!’ 4.15 pm: A brief forage in my cable adapter box. I’ve every permutation except the one I need: a XLR female-to-female. My inbox continued to drip like a leaky roof.

5.30 pm: Dinner time. After which, having not passed over the threshold of the door yet today, I walked into town to take the cold air. Rather than plough-on with the next task on next Post-it, I used the evening to take stock. My recent reading had presented me with a new lens through which to view my past and its influence upon the present.

A reflection on disappearance: