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… but only after running your two miles, coffee and fruit breakfast, Morning Prayer, cleaning up, Palm Sunday procession and Mass. The sermon went down well — even I liked it — and now I’m winding down, though I’ll have some errands to run, and have a couple of errands to run. And Holy Week looms ahead —

…as Ric Ocasek and the Cars would say. You might think that Saturday would be a day of relief and relaxation — but you would be forgetting that I am a clergyman and this is the day before Palm Sunday and the onset of Holy Week. No rest for the sacred! This will be a zoo-ey week, but we’ll have Easter at the end of it, and that’s welcome every year.

I ran my two this morning, getting off to a decent pace before something caught my attention and slowed me to a walk, and then… Morning Prayer, hot coffee and breakfast, a little work, a meeting with the Rector to talk about Palm Sunday, lunch, mopping up the work from this morning… and now it’s nearly 3:00 and I haven’t done anything frivolous yet, much less anything relaxing or relieving.

Chilly drizzle? A drizzle chill? The temperature was not unreasonable this morning, but the air was just past the saturation point with ultra-light drizzle. That brought the perceived temperature down considerably, especially once one had run a bit more than half of one’s two miles. But hey, it was a satisfactory pace, and it came to an end. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, more coffee at home, more research on disciplinarity, rhetoric, and philology. I worked out a sermon for Palm Sunday, and I tried to read a book I must evaluate, but I kept dozing…

I’m reading some Paul de Man these days for a particular project, and however culpable his Nazi collaboration and his self-reinvention are, he certainly hits some important marks. ‘Literature, instead of being taught only as a historical and humanistic subject, should be taught as a rhetoric and a poetics prior to being taught as a hermeneutics and a history.’ ‘Perhaps the fine, nearly imperceptible line that, in the present day, separates semioticians and grammarians from theoreticians of rhetoric — a line that frequently traverses one and the same author’s work — may be inextricably intertwined with the “waning” of modernity.’
Sure, I’d argue a point or two, here or there, but I was surprised to see how apposite his observations were.

Margaret needed to take an early bus this morning, so I walked with her to the High Street stop and started my run from there this morning — meaning that I ran the opposite direction from my usual. It was a startling reminder of how great a difference that perspective makes. Up till the Ladybank Paddock stop (where I disembark from the X2 from Oxford), I just don’t see the parks and buildings and landmarks from the widdershins direction, and it was delightful.

Coffee and fruit, about to clean up and go to church for Morning Prayer, then resume reading and writing (maybe a little marking). Yesterday was swallowed with meetings and a protracted video-podcast interview, in which I suspect I spoke too incautiously on a number of topics, but there we are. It was a pleasant enough conversation, mostly about differential hermeneutics (about which any reader knows that I’ll talk indefinitely to anyone at any time). I’ll mention it when it’s released, if I’m not too embarrassed.

Somebody asked in an email, ‘What makes you feel alive?’ I’ve been writing an essay on drop-dead deadline, but the pressure hasn’t felt as vivid as has the excitement of putting thoughts together, and looking into what other people have thought on related topics. That makes me feel alive — the whizzing of nerve cells and synapses (I realise they don’t really make a whizzing sound, but in my imagination they do) as they pelt ideas around the vast vacant spaces my brain affords, bouncing off odd protrusions here or finding there a long, clear shot that even motivates my fingers to type out what’s gone on internally.

Oh, and I did run my two miles this morning, at a steady, grumbling pace. You’d think that after several years of this practice, my legs would treat it as no big deal, but you would be sadly wrong. Or at least, I’m sad that you’re wrong. My legs feel every bit as tired and resistant as they did two years ago. I will chalk this up to being old, will note that it’s a lot better than being dead (though not in the theological sense), and will move on to note that I enjoyed a hot breakfast, Morning Prayer, some grocery shopping, another cup of coffee, and more research and writing before heading off to a couple of church events and, this afternoon, a video-podcaster interview.

Ran my morning two miles (more than a mile before a couple of my relevant muscles, whose names I don’t know cos I’m not that kind of runner, loosened up), coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, quick stop for groceries, second cup and then throwing myself headlong into writing. I pledge.

Ran my morning two miles with heavy legs, but not at a lugubrious pace. Coffee and fruit, I’ll go to Morning Prayer in a few minutes, and the rest of the day I’ll try to devote to marking, editing, and writing.

I ran my short route this morning cos it was raining (lightly but steadily); then coffee and Morning Prayer, fruit breakfast I’m changing my hot breakfast regiemn to Sunday and Wednesday, today was a transitional day), morning Mass for Passion Sunday, then the Annual District Committee Meeting for St Helen’s, and in a short while Evensong followed by a Taizé planning event (planning for Taizé worship, not a meeting conducted in meditative chants).

Very leisurely two miles this morning, running and walking and even stopping for half a mo, giving my muscles and joints a chance to relax. Then coffee and Morning Prayer in my study, hot breakfast, a morning catching up on this and that, and a little bit of work.

I have a vague plan to go to the church to take photos of the Women of the Bible window (the west end of the Our Lady aisle) for possible deployment on notecards in this 30th anniversary of the ordination of women in the UK year. While there, also to check out the Abingdon Artists exhibition in a more systematic way; I had been to look for Fr Paul’s contributions, but had ignored everything else.

Ran both of the last two mornings: Last morning, very heavy legs and a slow run, and this morning a good pace and limber legs. Coffee and fruit breakfast, shower, and Morning Prayer. Yesterday I came home and leaned into some academic business, t(hen a meeting about fund-raising at the church, then grocery shopping, then home. Today I went directly from MP to run some errands, most of which were balked — but I did take the opportunity to look in at mostly books and Abingdon’s Oxfam shop. Yesterday I spent hours working on a page of stamp-shaped images in an illustration app only to have it produce a tiny image that I couldn’t persuade it to resize to larger dimensions; then I tried it in my obsolete copy of Artboard (by MapDiva) (you can download v 2.4 here, but it’s strictly a take-your-chances, don’t-blame-me operation; OTOH I have found artboard to be the most intuitive vector graphics app Iz’ve used, which means of course it had to be shut down).

No rain, so I ran my two miles (musing about how I imagined, once upon a time, that it would get easier and easier), coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, then will stay at church for midweek Eucharist, then home for the afternoon, probably.