WFH: DAY 18. 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: I returned to monitoring personal tutees and postgraduates. In these times, the otherwise polite sign-off at the close of a letter, ‘best wishes’, has taken on an unusual earnestness and specificity of implied content. On the whole, mature students (in their 40s and above, especially) are dealing with the crisis better than those between 19 to 21 years of age. The former bring to the situation an accrued wisdom, sense of proportion, and practical sagacity. They’ve survived less and, sometimes, worse.

The household shrine to the natural world: a Noah’s Ark of bits and pieces collected on walks in parks and along the shoreline over the years. Now all such things, along with friends, lovers, colleagues, and even those whom we didn’t get on with, seem precious and missable:

10.30 am: On with admin of a more general kind, while fielding student queries and anxieties. In a large-scale crisis, it’s often the small-stuff that causes us the greatest anxiety. And, truth be known, even a lot of small-stuff coming together all at once doesn’t add up to big stuff. The big-stuff, presently, is so enormous as to be ungraspable. (Don’t even think about it!’, as it were.) Which is why we’ve no option other than to deal with this crisis hour-by-hour and challenge-by-challenge, within the confines of our homes, and with the support that others render us, and which we return in kind.

12.00 pm: A brief MS Teams flurry and update with other staff about matters of gravity and practicality.

1.30 pm: I returned to the studio to implement the skills I’d learned yesterday evening in the context of Adobe Audition CC’s session framework. ‘Stay focused! Write down what you think you think you know!’ (As opposed to practising lip-reading while watching Facebook videos with the sound off.) The layout of the main mixing desk needed to be rethought. The near-field monitors had been pushed too far from one another by the double-screen arrangement.

4.00 pm: A new Genelec subwoofer arrived yesterday. This would form part of a portable and high-quality PA system — in the spirit of the ‘Gig-in-a-Bag’ endeavours that I pursued after 2010 — for live presentations in small-scale venues. 4.30 pm: I did a runner:

One other runner travels the periphery at this time of the afternoon, and in the opposite direction. Likely, we’ll never meet … never know who we were.

7.15 pm: At sunset:

On to a subordinate mixing desk in order to test out another analogue/digital interface and the new PA system.

A reflection on parting: