I used to hate Marmite. Now I really like it. All things are possible.
Sunday, April 26, 2020.
Monday, April 27, 2020. WFH: DAY 27. I sleep to the hoot of an owl and wake to a wood pigeon’s coo. The days pass more slowly under lockdown, in my experience. Life proceeds at a gentler pace, even though there’s as much to do as in the ‘time before’. I think this peace amid the storm is what I’ll best remember. Today was overcast for the first time in a long while.
8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: I attended to the week’s teaching admin, confirmed appointments, balanced my commitments, and kept my eye on approaching deadlines. There’re people who find my unwavering routine both perplexing and frustrating. Believe me, it has been cultivated over time. Up until I was seventeen years of age, my life was untidy and haphazard. I woke-up one morning, and everything changed. (In the background: Miles Davis’ Pharaoh’s Dance, from Bitches Brew (1970).)
11.00 am: While walking through the cemetery yesterday, I talked to myself about sound and music improvisation. I recalled Christian Marclay’s realization that he’d come to music from a fine art, rather than a music, background. And that had made all the difference. The traditions and mind-sets are very different, one to another. Likewise, I’ve come to instrumentation not as a musician but, rather, as an artist. My commitment to learn music theory and play well is with a view to being better able to work with musicians, rather than turn myself into one.
A new crop of postgraduate applications beckoned. 12.00 pm: A little studio maintenance: an otherwise furloughed equalizer and compressor were re-employed as adjuncts to the reel-to-reel tape recorder.
1.45 pm: Following lunch and a brief consultation, I returned to the writing project.
The source material that I’m reading is as personal as it’s illuminating of the subject’s dilemmas, hopes, and internal workings of the heart and soul. I was on sacred ground. ‘If only I’d known. If only you’d known.’ We were more alike than either of us could’ve imagined.
4.30 pm: A run around the Vicarage Field.
7.45 pm: Socks and smalls paired and folded, I returned to software procurement and installation for the remainder of the evening.