WFH: DAY 75. 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: The inbox was reduced to ‘1’ unread mail. Good enough for now. Occasionally, the School get inquiries from potential applicants to our MA Fine Art scheme who don’t yet have the necessary experience and skills to embark immediately. Our advice is to delay their ambitions for a year and, in the meantime, undertake set projects designed to develop capacity. Very often this exercise works, and the applicants are offered a place. The Master’s scheme is about mastery. To get on to it, you need to first serve-out your apprenticeship.
9.30 pm: I reviewed the writing project. This would be the final run-through. Small changes levered large improvements.
In the background, a brief exchange with a Twitter friend about the veracity of The Met: Photography’s ascription of a photograph. The sender claimed, albeit in square brackets (which probably means it’s a guess), that the photograph represented ‘St. Cyriac’s Church at Lacock Abbey’, Wiltshire. Other ‘owners’ of the digital version of the same image have repeated the assumption uncritically. (Always check your sources.) Having been there and photographed that, as it were, I demurred. They aren’t the same church. No way:
11.45 am: ‘Ding-dong!’ The courier delivered a surprise ‘hamper’ of M&S curry meals from our sons. What thoughtfulness. What gratitude in return. So, that’s the next fortnight’s dinners sorted:
After lunch, having made some headway with writing, ‘ramped-up’ the ruthlessness and hacked out the remaining dross from the text. Less is more. Less is better. (The temperature rose. Windows were opened. Emails that didn’t require a response arrived.) It is not enough, for me, to write something well; it must also illuminate someone else. 5.00 pm: An end.
Dinner (courtesy of the offspring):
7.30 pm: Exam board admin, first, followed by a dispersion of outlines for the MA Exhibition modules. ‘Can we move on now, please?’ I still had a bee in my bonnet about the erroneous appellation of The Met: Photography tweet. I’ll not rest until I correctly identify the church in the image. (Of course, it may no longer be extant.) On into the night … .