Month: April 2020

Those who can’t teach. House (detail) #7: WFH: DAY 31. 8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: I dispatched responses to incoming mail, downed a second cup of tea, and made ready for the day’s onslaught. This Thursday was, as ever, dedicated to the third-year painters. They’ve now received the PowerPoint template on which to submit their exhibition pieces and supporting…

What had I missed? WFH: DAY 30. 8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: I held a Vocational Practice consultation before launching into the first of the day’s online PhD tutorials. I’d first gained competence in conducting conference tutorials with our PhD tutees, some of whom studied from afar. Whether either exchanging typed messages or talking to one anothers’ faces, business…

WFH: DAY 28. 8.15 am: A communion. 9.45 am: I plundered my Inbox and caught up on the latest decisions regarding assessment-submission protocols, organized my Post-its (there’s a subtle pleasure in scrunching one up once every item on its list has been fulfilled), and prepared for the deluge of marking that will inundate my life once May begins. At this…

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…

WFH: DAY 26. Last night I had another dream about losing a bag while travelling. (It recurs, periodically.) The interpretative range for such in popular culture is a wide as it is contradictory. For example: ‘You fear losing something precious’; ‘You need to let go of something that’s holding you back’; and, ‘You’re losing it, mate!’ (I’ll go with the…

WFH: DAY 24. 8.15 am: A communion. 8.45 am: Today was set aside for third-year painting tutorials. Inevitably, the conversations would range wider, taking in matters of health, well-being, and administration. Yes. We’d all like the present reality to be other than it is. But with the ‘curse’ comes the opportunity to: reflect more thoroughly upon who we are; determine…

‘I’m not here right now’ (Webclient notification). WFH: DAY 23. 8.00 am: A communion. I’ve a short list of friends and students on whom I check periodically. I don’t presume that those whom I consider well-able to deal with this crisis always are, necessarily. We each of us, I imagine, pitch lower than our best, some days. Moreover, my incarceration…

WFH: DAY 22. 8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: The start of a day of MA tutorials for the Exhibition and Portfolio modules. Inevitably, there were a few technical hitches. (I’d been expecting far more.) The hard part is discerning who, of the participants, is the cause. Often, no one is to blame. At least there was the messaging-mode as…

WFH: DAY 21. Although, the Easter holiday was largely devoted to work (on my own terms). What else was there to do in between one daily-exercise regime and another? I’d set myself the task of testing old and learning recently acquired equipment, familiarising myself with new software programs, exploring the possibilities of improvisation (on my own terms), revisiting a recent…