In Edge Street with a kir pondering the first week back - hard to imagine that this time last Friday I was stirring butternut squash soup and lemon marmelade in my quiet haven in the West while working what time to set the alarm for my ride out of the Frome Valley.

The SPEEC conference in Oxford on Saturday (http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/speec/index.html) was a gentle and thought-provoking affair. Quietly directed by Chris Garrard, I glimpsed a parallel world of academics and performers / artists trying in their own ways to answer the same questions - the relationship between the brain and the body in aesthetic experience, how to balance process / research / serenditpity and outcome / intent / performance, how (or whether) to capture the experience, how (or whether) to try to intervene in the worlds of sight and of sound (and what about scent, touch, taste?),  the tension between the maker / performer, the market / gallery / concert hall programmers / funders and the audience (live or virtual). I am wondering whether it might be possible to set up some sort of exchange / conversation about research by practice in sound and visual arts - would be wonderful!

Chris had kindly set up the singing bowls in the Committee Room along with a slide projector. I gave a brief introduction to my work and introduced Chris who showed a section of the film we made together to a full house with lots of questions. Later in the day, an academic from Oslo who had been working on texture and sound introduced himself and sent over some fascinating papers about their work - he seemed interested in setting up a joint project. Perhaps in the summer...? I also met two men with very different approaches to capturing the sound world - one seems to play sound through a space and record the echo and extracts rhythms to create new patterns, the other seems to play a sound into a space and, from the echo, creates an accoustic 'map' of the space - so it is possible to play a sound and work out what it would sound like from within the space. We agreed to spend a day playing together - to be continued... And the dress, chosen with my aunt and part-sponsored by my globe-trotting mother - was just the ticket ;-)

I got back to London to find the flat grubby - sheets on bed, bathroom full of damp towls and pubic hair, sink with dirty dishes, depleted store cupboard and the scattered debris of a potted palm tree that must have been taken by the winds from some balcony to crash down into the courtyard, overturning table and chairs, the impact narrowly missing the windows. Hmmm.

Sunday glorious sunshine - early morning swim, cleaning, shopping and a very happy hour with young Jojo pushing buttons and jumping down the stairs at the Science Museum followed by lunch with Michael and Caro.

The rest of the week is a bit of a blur with early morning radio full of awful news of the death and torture of brave protesters in Syria, release of prisoners in Burma, more bank bonuses and endless twittering about referendum on Scottish independence. Mild days noticeably lengthening. Four swims (;-)), in bed by 10 (mostly), brain and glass prep for a few things coming up tutorials with Martin and with Priscilla (reading Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), a meeting about a print seminar that I seem to be leading by default, a meeting with a scarily high-powered gallery owner / collector next week, meetings in early February with the medical students at Bristol University and with Above and Beyond charity / the Eye Hospital about two different projects to make interactive sculptures for public engagement work, Kings College / Opera Foundation 'speed dating' event next week to meet scientists interested in making performance work for Somerset House in the summer, a talk at the RCA about the Creative Quarter project and PR / preparation for a talk at GVArt about the Trauna show. And ideas for the birds for the Dublin exhibition flittering about in the back of my mind.

Dinner with Charlotte (rushed but lovely) Private Views at RCA for Fashion show (heaving in every sense) and at the Aram Gallery Send to Print show (brittle and depressing), experiments with press moulding and rare earth casting (complete failure), 3D modelling for the Wilding effect (fiddly but finally worked it out!) and cold working (hard graft but such a delight to see a hidden form arise), many many hours sandblasting plus one hot shop session with the new layering technique (very promising), the second session frustratingly cancelled. 

Feel exhausted just reading about it - the laundry is done and so am I!