Month: March 2023

When I woke up this morning, the rain was steady and serious. I expected just to give my morning run a miss, with a mixture of regret at deviating from my pattern and relief at… not running for two miles in the rain. After two-thirds of a cup of coffee, though, I noticed that the birds were singing and that I could no longer hear the rainfall. On that basis, and bearing in mind that the hour of transition from night to day often banishes nighttime rainfall, I put on my trainers and hoodie and rain shell and took off for my run. I neglected one factor.

Rain that diminishes for one minute often returns several minutes later.

So: two soggy miles, 10° (though it felt a good deal chillier in the wet), and a surprisingly good pace. Glad to get home, impressed (if somewhat hesitantly) to see several attractive job openings in the end-of-week adverts. And I’m almost dry.

Up to 10° this morning, two miles, and a surprisingly strong pace (I didn’t set out for a fast pace, it just happened). I have plenty to do; let’s see if I can knock several things off my list today.
I had a good conversation yesterday relative to a job possibility: ‘good’ in the sense that it wasn’t obviously catastrophic (I’m not sure how to characterise it otherwise). That was especially welcome, since I also received a rejection letter. Nowt for it but to keep sending out applications.

It’s the vac, so I’m trying to be lazy and relaxed while I can, but I do have plenty of para-pædagogical tasks to tidy up. Reading lists to draft, special revisions to timetable, lingering marking to clear out, lectures and in-class exercises to plan, and of course more job applications to write and send out.

Two miles this morning, limber and fluid muscles, 9° according to the Home Office (though I’m sceptical) with cloudy but dry skies, and a very satisfactory pace. Swollen knuckles still playing up, but I’m trying to push back with ibuprofen.

Two miles in 5°, adequate pace (I wasn’t trying very hard after several days of a good pace), and all before the expected rain began. (I just looked outside and after I’d let the dogs out fifteen or twenty minutes ago, it has started to rain — thankful that it wasn’t raining at six o’clock.)

A little research suggests that I may be suffering as much from arthritis as from chilblains (or ‘chilblains on my arthritic fingers’). I resolve not to moan about aging, but I’ll simply note that if I were given a choice between having limber, painless fingers or having swollen joints and heightened skin-sensitivity, I’d have chosen the former.

Every five years or so I have to scour the web to find a copy of the recruiting video for the We Know/No guild in Warcraft for which I supplied a [time-constrained, so not up to my personal high standards] voice-over. I’m dropping it here so that I’ll know where to find it from now on…

This morning I took my chilblain-afflicted fingers out for my two miles in 0°, but dry and no real wind. My pace was okay — I didn’t expect much of my legs, but everything went satisfactorily. The chilblains, though, are a beast. They’re on the first knuckles of my index fingers, swollen and very sensitive, and they’ve been lingering for about two weeks. I long for warmer weather not just for general equanimity, but to banish these vexing thorns in my flesh….

I recently binged some television while Margaret was away, watching back episodes on my laptop at the dining room table. I mention this because while the speakers on my MacBook Air must be tiny, with attendant limitations on their frequency range, I was utterly flabbergasted by the fidelity of their spatial definition. Several times I thought I heard a sound from outside the house and paused the playback to hear the sound more exactly — only to discover that the sound in question came from the soundtrack of the television show. Did I hear a bird? *pause* No, it was ambient sound from the garden scene. Is there a crowd gathering across the street at the pub? *pause* No, the guests arriving for a wedding were talking among themselves.

Granted that one wants speakers large enough to generate some bass, especially if one relishes rock’n’roll as I do. But honestly, I’m knocked out by the MacBook’s capacity to throw its voice (as it were) convincingly, and I’m certain that’s no small engineering feat. Full marks to Apple for that one. (Now, let’s talk about the Smart Keyboard for the iPad, which costs £169 and wears out after two years (I’ve had two.). That’s £80/year for a keyboard; there must be a way of making that more durable.)

As a measure of my folly, I ran my two miles this morning in a steady rain (beneath hoodie and windbreaker) at 6°. The weather provided a useful incentive to keep my pace up, and indeed I made it home in a good time on a day I had been expecting to take things easy as a buffer from the past two days of pushing my pace a bit. I wasn’t much fussed about the rain until I reached the point furthest from home, so that my opting to hurry home didn’t involve cutting the run short at all.
Then cleaned up, Mass at Cowley St John, and home again for hot breakfast and some marking (and blogging, obvs).

Full-on spring seems to have drawn back, presumably pour mieux sauter, so my morning two miles was in 6°, but the skies were clear and the breezes intermittent. I ran it at a satisfactory pace with no wooden-leg discomfort, so that’s two days in a row.

As I was falling asleep, I could hear heavy rain falling, so I was prepared to give my morning run a miss. Dawn, however, brought beautifully clear skies (though cooler temperatures) so I ran my two miles in 6° at a pleasing pace. While Margaret is away giving a talk in Crawley, I finished the second season of Succession, caught entirely off guard by the season two cliffhanger. (I have to talk with Nate about this; he admires almost everything about the series, but I’d say that there’s something unartistic about episode 10. Perhaps he will set me straight.)

I understand that some people might not want their lad held accountable for what he did, and I can imagine thinking that it wasn’t so bad, or that the other guys do just as bad or worse, and I can imagine worrying that the other side will do horrible things if we don’t fend them off somehow. But I can’t understand having watched the daily press conferences, having heard the daily news, having heard the Prime Minister speak to Parliament with solemn asseverations, and still not think that he knowingly misled the other MPs (or at least tried to).

This represents metacynicism and hypernihilism of the highest degree. I’m happy for someone to bring forward evidence to the contrary — but nothing in the former PM’s defence case comes even near to dispelling my impression.

At least for running weather. This morning’s two miles were in 10° air, a temperature that actually feels like weather and not an Augustinian definition of ‘evil’. That’s sufficiently… well, not ‘warm’ exactly, but temperate, that the light rain didn’t transmit a chill to the bones. And if my bones didn’t chill, you know it wasn’t cold, because I have poor circulation to my extremities and am apt to feel cold at the slightest excuse. My pace was okay — as projected — and my legs felt satisfactory, not leaden, and when I shifted to spring for the last blocks they felt strong and limber.

Two miles, 9°, successfully made my (unambitious) pace, and my legs felt like lead again. Honestly, what on earth… well, to be fair, I did walk a lot yesterday, but only six and a half miles — not anything to boast about, and that includes my morning run. I’ll put it down to getting old, and get on with my day.

In my last post I invoked ‘the Inverted Dessert Test,’ planning to make a link to some previous post in which (I was sure) I had already narrated the explanation for that arcane term. A quick check, however, reveals that not only have I not discussed this vital cultural phenomenon, but nowhere on the Web is there a reference to this culinary criterion, requiring me to supply this morning what has hitherto been lacking.

Where to start? I can only begin where my own experience of the IDT began, in my first year at Bowdoin College, during the reign of Arthur Portmore as Steward (was there an alternate House title for stewards?) — though Art may not have been the originator. On weekdays at 10 PM, the Steward would open the kitchen and enter the walk-in refrigerator, coming forth with various morsels that although still nominally palatable, were not fully fit for serving as dessert (‘pudding’, for my UK friends). These savoury collations were enthusiastically received and consumed by members of the house who were particularly peckish, nay, ravenous due to their having ingested substances that contribute to heightened appetite. Often that appetite made even the least promising leftovers look attractive — but sometimes there were no suitable leftovers on offer (either too little was left over, or what was left over was still presentable).

On particular days, though, controversy might erupt over whether servings of pudding (here it usually involved actual pudding pudding) had lain unwanted long enough to qualify for Open Kitchen consumption. In such circumstances, the Steward would invoke the Inverted Dessert Test: a serving of pudding (or other dessert) would be brought forward and, with suitable drama, held upside down over the woodblock table in the centre of the kitchen. If, after ten seconds, the pudding still adhered to the bowl without falling to the table below, it was deemed to ahve passed the Inverted Dessert Test, and was brought forward for the hungry rabble to consume. If on the other hand the pudding dropped to the table (or so threatened to drop that the Steward concluded the test before actual clean-up was required), it was back to the walk-in for another twenty-four hours of ageing.

Hence the name. Hence the allusion.

Two miles, 8°, occasional raindrops, and truly leaden legs. Honestly, one wonders whether some malign dæmon creeps into my bedroom of a night and switches my legs out for a different pair, or injects me with an immobility potion. I planned a distinctly unambitious pace, but my actual pace must have been well below even my modest expectations. I was not standing still for two miles, but a passer-by might have been excused for thinking I was. I felt as if I were running through pudding (leftover pudding, from which some of the fluidity has evaporated and which therefore would pass the inverted dessert test).

Plans to go to the Bod for a time today, to stretch my legs a bit more, to teach them a lesson.

I skipped my morning run yesterday, after a late and convivial evening at the Oriel Gaudy (for graduates from 1966 to 1971, which meant that I was the second-youngest person in the chapel, after my Lord the Provost). Then I took a relaxing Saturday to release some of the residual tension from term-time.

This morning, 5° and the usual two miles, at a gentle pace to accommodate my limbs’ day of rust.

Two miles, 9°, good time. I got most of the marking done yesterday that needed to be done; I’ll undertake some more today, and in the evening I’ll step in on behalf of the Revd Rob Wainwright, chaplain of Oriel, and lead Evensong before a Gaudy at Oriel Chapel.

Two miles, a tropical 9°, decent time. I’ll wrap up one phase of marking this morning, then some correspondence and prep for next term’s teaching. I may just come home early this afternoon…

(This isn’t about the British sitcom, which Margaret and I enjoyed immensely, but if anyone wants comments on that topic I’d be happy to opine.)

I mean, -1°. Really. Two miles, decent pace (though I didn’t make my anticipated pace, oh well). So far my March MAdness bracket is perfectly intact, as I had picked Pitt because of residual loyalty to Jeff Capel, and Texas A&M Corpus Christi because I wasn’t going to pick against the Body of Christ in a play-in game.

Picks made almost entirely based on sentiment — hardly any knowledge at all, and even less actually having watched the teams in question.