Month: August 2024

After bantering with Dave about the temperature, we both encountered inclement weather: he in the classic Floridean heat-humidity combination, and I in typical British-Isles drizzly rain. My miles went by satisfactorily, though, as long as you don’t count ‘got home looking like a refugee from Alice’s Pool of Tears’. Today is Wednesday, so I had coffee and after Morning Prayer, a hot breakfast. Then I had to clean up and hustle to St Helen’s for Wednesday morning Mass, where we observed the Feast of the Assumption, or Dormition, but certainly of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This afternoon, I’ve been working on an ordo for Sundays in Ordinary Time. I have a couple for marriage preparation this evening, so it will have been a full day.

Persistent blogger (I’d say ‘fellow persistent blogger’, but my daily entries are perfunctory compared to Dave’s) Dave Rogers, one of the original circle of people I used to link to regularly, commented today on my describing 19°C as ‘hot’. Fair play, Dave; I used to live in Florida too, but that was (mumbles like Trump) years ago, and I’ve lived north of 50° (the other kind of degrees) (one of the other kinds of degrees, sheesh) for the past fifteen years, sneaking up on being a quarter of my life. I’m fully acclimated to British temperatures, where (a) 19° really is a hot daybreak temperature and (b) we reserve the right to complain about the weather no matter what anyone else thinks of it. (Sorry for the links to Twitter, but VBP isn’t active on BlueSky.)

Anyway, it was down to 12° this morning, so my miles were pretty comfortable. Both knees behaved (after an early jolt or wobble from each of ’em), I pulled my stride closer to the front of my foot, and I sustained a decent pace through the morning. Coffee, fruit breakfast, some liturgical typesetting, pastoral visit to Fr Keith, and work this afternoon on tomorrow’s homily for the Assumption/Dormition….

Well, yesterday was hotter, 19°, but this morning was hot enough. I wore my knee brace for my run, and realised in short order that one problem, perhaps the problem, was that in my new stride, landing nearer my heel jolts my knee in a way to which it was unaccustomed. After I walked off a particular jolt for a few paces, I resumed running but landed further forward toward my toes, and that worked adequately. We’ll see how that plays for the longer run…

Then coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, shower, and now am working in the town square with a cup of coffee from R & R.

I walked more than ran this morning; my left knee went twanging after a short while, and though I coaxed it with spells of walking, and it led me to believe I could trust it, the knee would always twang again after a few strides. All part of adjusting to my new stride, I reckon, but a nuisance nonetheless.

In the afternoon I saw that Gavin Dunbar was playing the Tony Wilson tribute ‘St Anthony: A Tribute to Anthony Wilson’, which caught me right off guard; how could I, the connoisseur of rock elegy (and huge fan of John Cooper Clarke and the Manchester scene), not have seen it before? Thanks, and respect, to the King of Partick.

I should have realised last week that when I began experimenting with a longer stride, that my muscles would react by getting sore in different ways. I should have, but I didn’t. So the penny finally dropped this morning as I was wondering why my legs were stiff here rather than there where they’d always been stiff before, and why (once they limbered up and I began my full, loose stride) they seemed very rapidly to get sore in those places. I’m a slow learner, but I do learn. Anyway, I got my miles in, partly running and partly walking, and got home for coffee and hot breakfast, cleaning up, check-in at the church for wedding set-up, home to edit and print my homily, quick lunch, then off to church again for the wedding. after that, home for the afternoon and evening….

My morning run began with lingering stiffness, then limbered up into a refreshing, free, gleeful, elastic run, then quickly pulled back in to accommodate slightly overstretched calves. Ooops.
Ran some errands in Oxford, including picking up my Bod Card and some mail from my pidge at Oriel, inquiring at Blackwell’s for University diaries (not till later in August), look in at Scriptum (succumbed to buying their bespoke Diamine red ink ‘Turandot’), looked at current iPhones with a view to replacing my current phone once the new models drop in September, and so on.

Then home to extract the rest of tomorrow’s homily from my imagination. Rehearsal tonight.

I think that’s right. I got a slow start, but my legs warmed up and hit a good pace fairly quickly. Home for coffee, fruit, and Morning Prayer. For the morning, I have to think about weddings and interdisciplinarity till 10:45 or so, then will go to meet SSH alumna the Revd Monika Doering and family, perhaps chat over coffee, and then show off the church. Afternoon for more reading and writing, heaven permitting.

It took a long time for my limbs to get loose this morning, but by the time I took the turn home I was hitting my stride satisfactorily. Then I had coffee and a hot breakfast, Morning Prayer, catching up on emails, working on feast day ordos, working on my wedding sermon for Saturday, and a meeting with the Team Vicar….

Kottke links to a proposal that one could significantly alleviate the rush toward climate catastrophe by billionaires all chipping in and buying heat pumps for their fellow-citizens. In fact, the report suggests, the impact would be so positive that it would eventually be cost-neutral.

Probably so, but this masks the greater problem, namely, that by allowing the simple existence of billionaires, we have invited on ourselves an era of Bond supervillains — many of them passive supervillains, malevolent only in holding back monies that the government should be taxing and using for public good.

I’m not begrudging anyone 999,999,999 of whatever the local currency might be; if you need that much, bless you poor soul grasp those pennies hard. But ‘billions’-scale finance belongs always and only in public interests, and not in the hands of private individuals. That much power warps public governance (witness the scale fo political donations in the US presidential elections, and the private interests pumping money to Supreme Court justices), and allots individuals the prerogative to conduct such vast projects as space exploration for their own benefit.

Nuh-uh.

I’ll get cranky and gripe about the climate costs of ‘AI’ research another day.

I almost talked myself out of running this morning, as the weather was rainy and warm. In the end, the force of habit was too great to resist, and I laced up my trainers and sandwiched my run between two spells of rain. Coffee and fruit for breakfast, a teleconference, retirement planning followed by a special lunch with my dearest, and home for some digital typesetting, more work and reading.

Danya posted the second part of her argument over at her blog yesterday; I support most of her case, except that I would hold back from leaning hard on identifying Jesus with Hillel-ism; there was abundantly enough diversity among Pharisees for Jesus to fit into his own distinct mode, close to but not identical with Hillel. The broad point remains: Jesus wasn’t arguing with Pharisees as the representative of a rival religion, nor even a rival sect, but as one Judaic leader in the mode of other such prominent representatives as Hillel and Shammai. And one reason things sometimes got heated between Jesus and his contemporaries was that his teaching was so similar to theirs, but without acknowledging their authority and correctness but rather asserting his own distinct angle within a shared outlook.

With the apostles and especially with subsequent generations of church leadership, the conflicts rapidly outweighed the shared outlook (though not as rapidly as most Christians have typically assumed) — but Jesus argued with (and defended!) Jewish contemporaries as one of them. We who hold the faith of Jesus would add ‘and more’, but the former conclusion is sound no matter the status of our ‘and more’.

Good morning run, coffee and fruit breakfast, Morning Prayer, some time spent investigating and experimenting with typefaces for redesigning some parish resources. Then I had a long-ish meeting with the rector about upcoming major services and how we might work differently on service resources in the future. Afternoon, working on a preliminary draft of the service for our patronal in September.

I had a bit of an Olympic moment this morning, as I needed to get from the 8:00 at St Helen’s to vest and be ready for the 9:30 at St Michael and All Angels. Of course, I had run my morning miles, and at a pace I was pleased with; coffee and fruit, showered and dressed in time to get to St Helen’s. And after a service conducted with reverence and no undue dallying, I took off and packed my vestments, hurried to St Michael’s, and arrived in plenty of time to vest again and celebrate the Mass there.

Then home, to feed the dogs their lunch, and to let my mind go gently slack and even to doze for a bit.