Choose righteousness before happiness, comfort, prosperity, fulfilment, health, and personal need.
Tuesday, December 17. We took a final walk alongside The Meadows, bought Christmas presents at a memorabilia shop nearby, and procured pastries before returning to our accommodation to retrieve belongings. From there we climbed and descended the streets (taking in the pulled-pork sandwich emporium) to Edinburgh Waverley station. The 12.52 pm for London Euston arrived at Wolverhampton on time for us to make the Aberystwyth connection. The trains had been uncomfortably warm. But we’d enjoyed a remarkable weekend. It had been a restorative trip.
Last night, while tossing and turning, I began to conceive, more broadly, my response to the Sound and Music Call for Participation (which I’d been in two minds about since the end of last week). If the trial composition is a success, then I might just persuade myself to launch into a grander and further CD project.
Wednesday, December 18. 9.10 am: I’d managed to obtain an appointment with my GP. For some time I’ve had a sinus infection, which antibiotics have not alleviated. The doctor and I had agreed one more prolonged dose of the same. The condition effects my hearing, among other things. The upper-frequencies have been compromised. Moreover, I’ve a high-pitch tinnitus-like ringing in my ears (which occludes the upper-frequencies) caused by the compression of the sinus canal, due to the infection. The combined effect approximates to a perpetual version of the type of in-ear discomfort experienced on take-off and landing.
9.40 pm: Back at my desk to deal with admin, queries, quandaries, references, registers, and postgraduate admissions. My morning was thus fully booked. Wil ‘the carpet’ sawed and banged downstairs and, afterwards, outside my study door. A little Sgt. Pepper to begin.
Our Head of School sent me a photograph showing Dr Christopher Webster van Tonder and I at the undergraduate registration desk in the Great Hall, Aberystwyth Arts Centre. By the look of my military-grade laptop, the size of the computer monitor, and the design of the ‘departmental mobile phone’, it was taken in the first half of the 1990s, a year or so after I was made Lecturer in Fine Art. We both look so terribly young (and happy). It reminded me just long I’d been an academic:
2.00 pm: I began writing the abstract for my response to the call:
7.30 pm: On, then, with the my grant application for the CD related to this project, should the Call for Participation prove to be the harbinger of something more ambitious.
Associative thinking:
