Wednesday, May 15

I cycled to work in the sun and walked stridently from Kalasatama to Arcada, listening to some ambient soundscapy work by Nivhek, or Liz Harris as her dentist calls her.

According to Sputnik Music

The artist better known as Grouper is back from the void with a new set of ethereal souvenirs, this time under a brand-new moniker.

Nivhek is a collection of recordings made by Harris during residencies in Azores (Portugal) and in Murmansk (Russia), as well as home recordings made in her home.

So now we know.

As I walk across the grass on the final stretch past Prakticum to Arcada I notice that the landscape looks like a “landscape”. I pause to catch the four humans in the right positions. Spot the fourth one!

Today we have the entrance examinations, so I will walk into Arcada and up the stairs to find a long queue of tense and bewildered young people. I will talk to Jutta and Fred and then go to my position.

Shortly afterwards I will discover that my position has shifted. I will spend my morning invigilating five students with particular needs. They will have no way of getting to the toilet and back without someone accompanying them and opening the doors on the way back.

Jutta will pop in and out at regular intervals as I message her every time an applicant needs a toilet break. And some of them need several.

I will pass the time with my iPad and my wireless keyboard, writing a paper and answering mails. I will remake the Lego iPad stand that Auo and I made, to see if I can get it to allow the iPad to charge while in portrait position.

I will realise that I don’t have enough pieces here. That will set me wondering where we have put Auo’s Lego, including that black hotrod we both used to take apart and reassemble at regular intervals until we finally had something we both felt looked exactly right.

I will find it tonight, and upgrade my iPad stand.

The students will take their allotted four hours and at 13:30 I will leave the room to find Jutta insisting we go out for something to eat right now – and preferably at Chico’s. So we will, and both have the jalopeno burger of the day and Pepsi Max. Chico’s no longer has vegeburgers. Instead you can have any burger on the menu with a beanburger, so we will.

In the afternoon we will wait for a hand-picked team to finish marking the applicants’ essays, so that we can decide how many we need to interview. None, we will decide. We will take the first fifteen applicants and put the rest on a waiting list.

We will note that, for the first time ever, one of our candidates scored 100% in all the tests.