8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Emailery, postgraduate admin, and preparations for the first hour of the morning. 9.00 am: An initial MA fine art tutorial:

9.30 am: … followed by a pastoral tutorial. 10.00 am: I checked-over a new purchase of active-monitor speakers. These, in conjunction with a sub-woofer, will serve as the main amplification system, both in the studio and for small-venue presentations:

10.15 am: I returned to sourcing and procurement. (Inevitably, purchases beget other purchases.) This felt like a slow day, but one that I was quite content not to speed up. I returned to a remote-switching problem on the mini-pedalboard, which I’d failed to resolve last night and, in turned out, failed to resolve today, too. (You can’t win them all.) 12.00 pm: A final ‘trussing’ of the pedalboard. Job done!

1.30 pm: A little tidying. A little stocktaking of cables, plus, and adapters. However many permutations of them I’ve amassed over the years, there’s always some combination that’s absent from the collection. (A quality pair of 1/4″ TRS to XLR cables? Nope.) More years ago than I can recall, I was bought three stainless steel coat hooks, designed by Terence Conran (who died in September this year). I’d never had a use for them … until now. They’re ideal for hanging my headphones off the mixing and work desks. They also look rather swish. A little drilling, and they were installed. Studio maintenance was complete for today.

4.15 pm: The walk. In town, a lightness of spirit was attempting to break through. But there’s still caution on the streets. We’re uncomfortable in proximity to one another, understandably. Smiles and other expressions of conviviality are occluded, for the most part. There was a chill in the air that was appropriate for the time of year. But this still felt like a world apart, in comparison to this time last year, when we’d not the slightest inkling of the horrors to come.

7.30 pm: There were references and letters to write and course submissions to comment upon. Catch-up! I remarked to a correspondent, to the effect: ‘Some types of admin are not burdensome, because they enable those to whom they’re directed to move-on in their life and work. But there’re other types which are an endless grief, and to no real purpose’.