March 1, 2021

Three friends are made, three lives are laughs and tears,
Through years of school and play they share.
As time stands still the days change into years,
And future comes without a care.

But fate and skill and chances play their part,
The wind of change leaves no good-bye.
Three boys are men their ways have drawn apart,
They tell their tales to justify.

(Gentle Giant, ‘Prologue’, Three Friends (1972).)

WFH: DAY 42/LENT 11. (St David’s Day.) 7.30 am:

8.00 am: A communion. After a catastrophic run-in with a cinnamon bun late on Saturday (which breached my allergy-tolerance boundary in an alarming way), I begin the week feeling as though I’m recovering from several well-targeted blows to the abdomen, bloated, tired, woozy, and a little fuzzy-headed. On past experience, these aftershocks will take a few days to reside. 8.30 am: A review of the week, the day, the morning, and the hour ahead, as well as the incoming mail.

9.00 am: The morning had been set aside for external examination preparations. Interrogatory questions had to be finalised in readiness for tomorrow morning’s viva voce online. I read through the text and listened to the examples of sound praxis for the final time. In the background, Teams messages were responded to, and ‘To dos’ added to the list that has no bottom.

Yesterday morning, while lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, I visited (in my mind’s eye) the rooms, corridors, stairwells, and grounds of the comprehensive school that I’d attended at Nantyglo, Monmouthshire. Albeit newly built back then, it was a dismal environment that had been constructed, in the absence of architectural vision and on the cheap, with little practical consideration and inadequate materials. Within six months of our taking-up residence, there were holes in the plaster board of the thin stud walls that divided the classrooms; metal windows had begun to work themselves loose; and the gravel-filled courtyards had spilled their contents onto the walkways. You could hear the lesson being delivered in the adjacent classroom almost as loudly as in one’s own. Some of the windows were three-stories up. Had one fallen out onto someone, they would’ve been killed. The gravel, for its part, provided an inexhaustible source of ammunition for playground fights. (What were they thinking?)

I joined the school’s Facebook group (as a voyeur). In the 1970s, long before the age of mobile phones, few pupils brought cameras to school. (They’d have got either nicked or broken.) The extant photographs taken during my time at the school were formal, for the most part: group portraits of rugby and hockey teams, choir and orchestra performances, and (occasionally) classes. There are many faces in those portraits that I’d known well back then, but haven’t thought about in all the intervening years. Curiously, I can still vividly recall the timbre and peculiarities of their voices. I don’t remember the names of all of them. But I do recollect their characters: the thugs and the bullies; the very clever and the talented; the kind and the quiet, the serious and the witty; the frightened and the bewildered; the boy who looked like a younger version of Terry Jones from Monty Python; another who appeared to be half-Indian, but wasn’t; the sixth-form boys who seemed to be as old as the staff; and the sports teachers whose faces still instil a chill in me. Then there were the girls whom I’d adored from afar, and the one that I’d gone out with for only two weeks. No much how you enlarge the photographs’ magnification, its impossible to get any closer. Forty-five years stand between them, then, and I, now. Who has survived; what did they go on to do; and where are they now?

By lunchtime, I’d conceived more than enough questions to fire at the candidate. Better too many than too few, though. All morning, in the background to my thought, the sounds of cutting concrete and pollarding were audible. There are few acoustic phenomena so aggravating and intrusive to have imposed upon the ears as an abrasive ‘burrrr’.

1.30 pm: I took a walk ”round the block’ in order to stretch my limbs and make the most of the Springtide:

2.00 pm: A further REF request needed a response, pronto. 2.30 pm: A deferred third year painting tutorial:

Think always of a scale from the hardest to the softest edge imaginable, in terms of both the subject and the painting; and try to exploit both extremes, and all the permutations in between.

3.00 pm: A staff training meeting about online applicant inquiries for the coming Saturday events:

‘I’m not used to being taught; I’m not sure I can learn these days’ (the voice of insecurity whispered in my ear). 3.45 pm: Done! With much to assimilate and put into practice. A phone call from my surgery inviting me to receive my first Covid-19 jab next Tuesday. (I’d never considered that I’d ever being mildly excited at the prospect of a vaccination.) 4.00 am: I plundered my photographic archives for images that I could use in the construction of a PowerPoint for the applications event.

7.30 pm: Art/Sound required a handout to flesh out the case study submission project for the second-year students.

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