Woke up late today after 12 hour sleep, knackered and aching from yesterday's wheelbarrow-ing of manure and collecting of seaweed from the shore. Enjoyed the work at the time (rich wet colours, the squelch of shit, the spray of the sea) but I'm reaping the rewards today.

11am, it being indoor weather, I went round to the art school An Talla Sollais for coffee. Nice to be back among artists. Tea and cake good too.

Rest of the day finishing putting in the window downstairs. Managed to fit in an indulgent afternoon nap, dribbling on the couch.

This evening to visit James Hawkins, an artist who went to the Ruskin (my art school) 30 years ago, just after leaving. Not sure what the Ruskin today has in common with his Ruskin (copying paintings in the Ashmolean; not allowed to use paint for a term, then only primary colours for another; nearly failing his anatomy exam for using an eraser) but maybe it's like Orwell's metaphor about Englishness: an adult who asks himself what the face in the mirror has in common with the face in the photograph, of him as a boy (the answer is nothing, except the name and of being the same person). I struggled to recognise James Hawkins' Ruskin, except for the fact that we had shared the same physical Ruskin, the building on Oxford's High Street. That really shocked me, to realise that 30 years ago, in the place where I'd experienced things of art and meaning, someone else had been having a similar experience. Shocking, but also humbling and comforting, as I heard it being remembered, and allowed myself to be in that bracket of looking back, having left.

Hawkins said, as though it meant nothing, that after he left, he came up here and it took him seven years to digest "what had happened to him". I'm not quite sure what to do with that.