Month: January 2020

Friday morning I received the painful news that a dearly-loved former student of mine, the Revd Dr David Efird of York University, had suffered a massive heart attack while exercising at his gym, and had died right away. David was only forty-five years old, an outstanding philosopher, and priest, and leader in his university. More than all, he was a wondrously gracious man; I don’t recall ever witnessing an unlovely expression from him. He and his partner and all who have known and loved him will be in my prayers at Mass this morning.

This news cast a pall over my weekend, and I couldn’t help thinking about David as I was running this morning. The run was uneventful — 10°, light rain, moderate breeze mile, time was 10:56. I was as wheezy as ever, but no other specific physical problems.

11:01, again with mild head winds, cool not cold. And again, harder to breathe than I sense it ought to be.

Tom the Dancing Bug, a/k/a Ruben Bolling, has a lovely bit of doggerel about the complications that arise from the gradual drift of copyrighted material into the public domain:

A bear, however hard he tries,
Grows tubby without exercise.
Edward Bear had barely started
When his body bent and farted.

You may not recognise his name,
but it’s the one in Public Domain.
He’s “Edward” here til ’22,
When Winnie’s copyright goes “pooh.”

(Explainer, in case it’s not obvious: A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, which refers to a stuffed toy as ‘Edward Bear’, entered the public domain on 1 January; Winnie-the-Pooh, which identifies the same ursine companion as ‘Winnie the Pooh’, will not enter the public domain for another several years. Bolling evidently thinks that date will be 2022, though seventy years from 1956 (Milne’s death) would be 2026, as best I can reckon. Clarifications welcome.)

11:02. Ah, well. A bit breezy, not very cold, but my breathing was even more laboured than usual.