Month: March 2025

I mean, it should be ‘Lent Vac’, shouldn’t it, since most of the vac comprises the last five weeks of Lent, and Trinity Term follows hard on Easter Day? But call it what you will, it begins today and to celebrate it we will welcome Shannon, Laura, and Ayres for a week’s visit.

Two decent miles this morning, coffee, and in a short while I’ll shower and make a hot breakfast. One or both of us will go in to That Oxford to meet the travellers, and the rest of the day will focus on their needs and interests.

I have some essays to mark, I promised to send my prelims students some guidance on gobbets, and I should talk with Sarah about setting the collection — but I’m through with tutorial teaching now for a few weeks. Indeed, I don’t expect to have tutes in Trinity Term, so it’ll be October till my next tutorials.

I took a very leisurely run this morning, followed as usual by coffee and fruit. I’ll feed the dogs and make tea for my better half, clean up and go to Morning Prayer, then I have a veritable mountain of emails to try to clear. I should prepare my talk for Sunday about Lenten spirituality, and after lunch will go to Oxford for the NT Seminar. I’ll join with Margaret in last-minute cleaning and arranging for a visit from Shannon, Laura, and Ayres tomorrow….

Merciful heavens, I’m relieved to have gotten through this four-week interval. In Hilary Term, I continue teaching whatever tutorials I usually offer, plus I take up the last four tutes for the Introduction to the Bible class for first-years. It’s a lovely time with wonderful students, but the sudden influx of essays and marking and tutes puts a lot of extra pressure on my late winter/early spring. Today’s the last day of that double fortnight. My preliminarians have been wonderful, and Sarah (my HB colleague) and I are hoping to give them a little extra coaching before they sit their exams, but today marks a real turning point for my diary. Oh, and I have the last Gospels tutorial for my Year 2 student as well.

So I started the day with a timed run, expecting that it would mark a real fall-off from my personal-record last two miles. I think I timed my energy-burning a little better, but it was still a few seconds off my previous timed run. No worries, though; it was my second-best time, and pulled my rolling average down to 18:22, with which I am well pleased.

So my day shapes up as run, coffee and fruit, shower and dress, Morning Prayer, rush to the bus, coffee in Oxford while I read essays, tutorial, lunch, two more tutes, then home to unwind and toast the end of Hilary Term teaching.

Easy (non-timed) run, 1° weather, coffee, hot breakfast (minus eggs), shower and Morning Prayer, meeting with a wedding couple, follow-up paperwork, long Staff Meeting, homework assignment for safeguarding certification, follow-up paperwork, tutorial essays to read…

Did I say that yesterday morning, between Morning Prayer (or more precisely, ‘beginning in the middle of Morning Prayer’) and the bus to Oxford, I spent some time in prayer and conversation with the legitimate heir to the throne of the United Kingdom? The basis of his claim was not perfectly clear; the sentences went by very rapidly. It seems, however, that his ancient family settled Abingdon in times past, one of the eight original families. Their claim to the throne was gazumped by Henry the Eighth and the Windsors in the nineteenth century, along with the spoliation of the monasteries. He was particularly anxious that I find and put him in contact with the first Black Canon in the Church of England, who is the descendant of one of the other original eight families. Alas, and somewhat oddly, although it’s not hard to find the first Black Bishop (the Rt Revd Wilfred Wood) and the first Black woman ordained to the priesthood (the Revd Eve Pitts), finding other Black ecclesiastical pioneers poses intricate web search challenges. If someone in Lambeth is reading this, may I suggest making a web page that covers Black and South Asian leaders in the Church?

I took my morning run widdershins today, as that takes me to the Iron Bridge earlier, and Thames Water has posted signs to the effect that they expect to cut off all vehicular and pedestrian traffic across the bridge between 10 and 14 March. I wanted to check this out at the beginning of my run rather than the end, so that if they followed through on their promise would find out before I was committed to retracing a long way back home.

No evidence that anything was going on today, though, at least not at 5:30. I ran a good non-timed loop, I’m home for coffee and fruit, in a while I will clean up and get ready for Morning Prayer. Margaret will head in to Oxford this morning for a meeting and lunch with an ethics colleague of hers. I have a Safeguarding homework assignment to do, and another for the Sodality, and I may receive an essay to mark, plus I can begin to prepare for next Sunday’s ‘Spirituality Snack’ for St Helen’s. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, as my dad used to say.

This morning, I really did not want to run. I didn’t feel achey or even especially leaden, but just weary through and through. Hey ho, I did some cursory warm-ups and started on my way, hitting a pretty strong pace on the out mile. A little before the end of my first mile, though, I felt that I was running out of gas, and the rest of the run was unpleasant in the extreme — again, not in terms of pain, but gasping for air and forcing my legs to do their best to keep up the pace.

Along the way, I realised that this was the reason I stopped timing my runs in the first place. The felt urgency of contant improvement, of never letting my time get slower but always faster, makes me… not so much anxious (an internal feeling) as driven (felt as an external necessity). There’s no reason in the world that I should be obligated constantly to improve my running time; I’m in my late sixties, I’m already in plausible health so far as I know, and being able to make a two-mile run at all is a significant victory over where I was five or six years ago, when I started by skipping rope in the back garden on James Street.

At the same time, I do relish the sense of some sort of progress, even just a tiny bit, so as to feel as though I’m not in exercise stasis. So I think that I may ratchet back my timing even more, perhaps just once a week or only when I feel like it, so as to allow mywelf to just run most days without pressure, but to have a check-in every now and then. We’ll see what happens.

I got home in significant discomfort (again, not pain, not torment, but overall discomfort) and had trouble hitting the ‘Stop’ button of the timer. When I could make the clock stop, it showed a time almost a whole minute faster than my previous personal best; that two miles pulled my rolling average down to 18:38.

Fruit and coffee, some continued preparations for this morning’s ‘spiritual snack’ session on the history of Lent, then in some order a second cup of coffee and some toast, cleaning up, I”ll lead the Sung Eucharist at St Helen’s, then the short talk, then home to do more work (I owe homework to the Diocese and also to the Sodality), and heaven permitting, a good rest. I could use a break — this part-time work, as all part-time workers know, can be a backbreaker.

I started my morning run at speed, but my legs were very stiff and my upper legs sore, and as I pushed to get some momentum and limberness, I accidentally did something off-kilter to the timer, so when I noticed halfway through, I just shut it down and took it easy the rest of the way.

Coffee, hot breakfast, Morning Prayer at home.

And a joke at my own expense: last night Margaret was making a late-evening pudding to supplement the Subway GF sub that constituted her railroad dinner, and she handed me the yoghurt to put back into the fridge. I put it back onto the upper shelf (according to the transcendent refrigerator law of ‘Always put items onto the smallest shelf that they’ll fit onto’), but it didn’t quite fit onto the shelf; something further back pushed it off the shelf when I let it go, and I reached back in a flash to catch the falling pot. Sadly… I mishudged the catch, and was just trying to push the (flexible) yoghurt pot back into the fridge, on a shelf — but that had the effect of squashing the (nearly-full) pot against the shelves as it fell, squeezing the pot and spewing yoghurt all over the kitchen. Margaret and I cleaned up, with some laughs and chuckles, but when we came downstairs again later she spotted another splatter of yoghurt… and another… further and further from the fridge. This morning she came downstairs and, standing in the front hall, said ‘I can’t believe the yoghurt reached even here!’ (It hadn’t. She was having a laugh on me. I am expecting to take a walk to church with her, and for her to say as we’re corssing the Iron Bridge, ‘Look! There’s even yoghurt here!’

So, a non-timed run this morning (good thing, because my legs were weary after my stretching them out yesterday morning for my timed run), bade Margaret good morning as she made her way to Wolverhampton for a catch-up with the Feeneys, fruit and coffee, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, then to my station in the Square at R&R, back to the Parish Centre to check messaages, home to feed the ladies their lunch (and to eat my own), then back to church for the ecumenical World Day of Prayer service (not live from the Cook Islands, but the chain of the day’s prayer begun from the Cook Islands), back to check for afternoon messages, and home at last to feed the ladies again, and to rest my bones.

The Ash Wednesday service last night went well, I think. Certainly we achieved a truly impressive success in ash/oil mixture for clear, bold forehead crosses; I’ve never seen the like in all my years of ordained ministry. My homily will be below the ‘More’ fold.

This morning’s run — 2°, thank you very much — was a good pace, a good time. Rolling average declines to 19:01 (and next run will probably lower it further, as the fifth time in my average will be bumped out of my rolling window with the next run, and it’s a time that’s a good bit slwer than I’ve been running for the last two weeks). This may be common knowledge among real runners, but it seems to me that I do better to increase the pace of my steps rather than the length of my stride. Sometimes my stride opens up more than others, but pushing my stride further seems to have less benefit than making myself stride more often.

Coffee and fruit, cleaning up and dressing for Morning Prayer, bus to Oxford, tutorials morning and afternoon, then home to my sweetheart and her dogs. Continue reading “Last Night, This Morning, and Afternoon”

Non-timed (good) run, coffee and hot breakfast, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer (St Helen’s Wharf barricaded because of a gas leak; that’ll be unwelcome for the 10:30 service), splendid meeting with an adult baptisand, then helped Margaret restore her data to her new phone, wandered to R&R because I left my folio there. Now to mark an essay or two, edit my Ash Wednesday homily, and come home to relax.

‘When the revolution happened I realised how much everybody hated me and I started to wonder why. Then I thought, would you rather have a country governed by the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice or one governed by an amoral, self-serving, tax-avoiding, privately educated elite?’
— Marie Antoinette, in I’m An Aristocrat, Get Me Out Of Here! by Mark Dawson; Gonzo
Moose Theatre Company @ Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, December 2013.

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but it looked from this side like a spam attack. I tried to login several times, but couldn’t break through. I did run gently yesterday, -1° thank you, non-timed, and hit a pretty good pace for much of the run. I had a lot of emailing and editing and writing to do for the parish, and ran out of steam late afternoon. That was frustrating, since I wanted to send back some marking.

This morning I took a timed run in a relatively balmy 0°, another good pace (though at first it felt unlikely — legs and lungs both warming up slowly), bringing my rolling average to 19:08. Don’t get excited — it’s hard for me to imagine my time will keep improving at this pace.If I do well, I’ll be slogging along in the mid-18s for a long time.

Coffee, fruit, Shower, Morning Prayer (and I’ve been forewarned that there’ll be a pastoral matter for my attention after MP), marking and work on Ash Wednesday sermon, and I mean technically it should be a day mostly off, the idea of which will taunt me from the sidelines till I just give up at the end of the day.