I’ll go back and fix the typos from Friday that are glaring at me from the editing window, but I want to catch up first.
Saturday morning I got my flu and COVID jabs (‘I’m giving the flu jab in your left arm because there’s an ‘l’ in ‘flu’, and the COVID jab in the right because there’s no ‘r’ in COVID’), then worked on some parish correspondence and homily-building. I noticed that a sermon from the past, a good one, provided the basis for a viable Remembrance Day homily. Then Kelvin, a friend of Nick Smith’s, came ’round to pick me up for a trip to Wolverhampton to see Bob Dylan’s renewed Rough and Rowdy Ways tour(!). I hadn’t seen Dylan since I caught his Street Legal tour in Augusta Maine in ’78, so this was quite a change indeed; he gave his all in the show, but at 83 that’s less ‘all’ than it was 46 years ago. The most striking aspect of the show was his decision to foreground the bluesy foundation of the songs he chose (all of Rough and Rowdy, with a few congenial selections from his back catalogue), beginning strictly at 7:30, ending at 9:00, no encore. He hasn’t been changing up the set list on this version of the tour, so we knew what to anticipate; I don’t know the album that well, though, so it illuminated the recent music in various ways. His always legendary gruff, somewhat indistinct vocals have not gotten clearer with time, alas, so that the live, improvisational changes he introduces in familiar lyrics went past me without registering. All in all, I was very thankful to catch him in the Black Country (thank you very much, Nick!), cos I’m sure I won’t see him again.
After a short night’s sleep, I scrambled to St Michael’s Sunday morning for the Remembrance Day service (Fr Paul conducted the town observance at St Helen’s), and then to catch some rest in the afternoon before preaching at St Helen’s for the evening Mass (to make up for missing the usual morning Mass so as to make room for the town memorial). All well.
I tweaked my knee Saturday morning, so I walked most of the two miles. Sunday I skipped, both to give my knee time to settle and to work on fine-tuning the homily. This morning I strapped the knee supporter on and ran my two satisfactorily, though my general tiredness (from weekend exertions and from the effects of the double vaccination) slowed me down. My arms have been very sore at the injection sites, but apart from that and the predictable tiredness, I’ve had no ill effects from the vaxes, and now I am able to repel infectious diseases before they reach me, so that’s good.