Month: August 2025

I had a productive writing day yesterday, making headway on mmy overdue essay. Later in the afternoon, we wandered down to the Old Anchor Inn, which would have been our local in Abingdon except that it had closed six months before we arrived. Under new management, it has been spruced up, will be serving both English pub menu and a repertoire of Thai offerings (specially since it lends itself so aptly to vegetarian and gluten-free alternatives — yippee!), breakfasts on Friday-Sunday, and lunch offerings I didn’t register. Sounds very firmly like our pub home.

My morning run today started off sluggishly, or so it felt. I had lain abed an hour or so later than usual, and was still groggy when I stumbled out onto the pavement. My pace, however, picked up as I ran, and by the end I hit another time that stretched my average to the good. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up, on my way to Morning Prayer and public office hours at R&R.

This morning’s run felt like nothing special, and when I got home it turned out to have been my best time since late July. I think I’ve proven that I have absolutely no capacity to judge how well, how fast I’m running.

Coffee and hot breakfast, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, stopped at the Cooperative to pick up staples, and now home with a cup of coffee, hammering away at my overdue essay. I’ ve begun rewriting it from the beginning, because with the beginning I’d made I was chasing every topic into the tall grass and researching the relevant background in depth. This was invited as a brief introduction, though, not a comprehensive e deep dive. Likewise, I need to cover five or six centuries in 8000 words; the essay won’t do its work by leaning into depth and comprehensiveness. So in this version, I’m trying to express myself with a degree of precision and clarity commensurate with the assignment, and to back off the temptation to footnote everything. I promise you that the background reading is fascinating, but I won’t have time to introduce you to it in this wordcount.

Plus, koff koff, the editor wrote me last night to remind me that they’re holding the next issue till I get the ms to them. I should be writing instead of blogging.

Having a hard time bearing down today, after knocking out the conclusion to my BNTS paper on ‘John, Jesus, and Jolene: Popular Music Explains an Exegetical Problem’. It’s been a long time since I’ve given a paper at a conference; I had forgotten how short a time 20–25 minutes is.

My morning run felt fine, though when I arrived home I was surprised to see that it fell at the slow end of my average (still improved my five-day average, as it knocked out another slower day). Coffee and fruit, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, then home for coffee and toast, and a wodge of emailing. I finished the Ty Cobb biography I’ve been reading, and one passage in particular really touched me.

‘On another occasion about ten years later, when [Ty Cobb and Grantland Rice were] passing through Greenville, South Carolina, Cobb said to Rice, “I’ve got an old friend in this town. Let’s find him.”
They proceeded to a small liquor store….
“Waiting his turn,” Rice wrote, “Cobb stepped up, looked the old boy in the eye and said, ‘How’s business?”
‘Just fine, sir,’ replied [Joe] Jackson, turning his back to rearrange a shelf.
‘Don’t you know me, you old buzzard?’ said Cobb.
“Jackson wheeled around. ‘Christ, yes I know you!’ grinned Joe. ‘I just didn’t know whether you knew me after all these years. I didn’t want to embarrass you or nothin’.…”
“I’ll tell you how well I remember you, Joe,” [Cobb] said. “Whenever I got the idea that I was a good hitter I’d stop and take a good look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement.”

   Charles Leerhsen, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, ch. 30 (Simon & Schuster, 2015)

As I may have written before, I have a very sensitive spot for betrayal; the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring when Bilbo asks to have the ring back, just for a moment — and Frodo sees the glint of possession in his elder cousin’s eye and knows that Bilbo must never be allowed to touch the ring again — just tears me up. By the same token, in an opposite way, being true touches me as well. The idea of Ty Cobb stopping off to see his old rival and pal Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Jackson not wanting to embarrass him (either of them, really) by letting on that he knew Cobb when Cobb didn’t immediately greet him, goes straight to my heart.

Yesterday’s run was on the good end of average, which was pleasing. The sermon at St Helen’s went well enough, then Nate and Margaret and I came home to rest, wandered around Abingdon and the Ock, dined at Ask Italian (a very agreeable dinner), and came home. We got Nate talking about is lectures i his History of Popular Music classes at Yale, which we loved to hear about and talk out with him.

This morning, didn’t run much of the way; various joints and muscles were dubious about the value of running, and sent painful messages (or just passive resistance), so I alternated running and walking, and didn’t time myself. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, public office hours at R&R, then home for Nate to pack up and prepare for his trip back to Paris to resume his itinerary back to the States. It’s been great seeing him; he and I have been understanding better some traits we have in common, and it’s good to have talked over those; and as I said, talking rock history with him is one of my favourite things to do. I keep thinking how great it would be to have a family music blog where Nate and Si and Pippa and Margaret and I could write (and argue, and affirm, and wonder) about bands, albums, and so on….

Yesterday’s baptism was lovely; the Book of Common Prayer punches the rite out (heavy on gender-exclusive language, alas, but gets to the heart of renouncing Satan ande uniting oneself with Christ). I was baking, or perhaps better ‘melting’, by the time of the Mass for the Assumption in the evening, but it was sweet to deacon for Fr Paul.

Nate arrived late last night — the theme of this short visit is ‘just hanging out, passing time with us as we spend our time’, so it’s not clear just what will happen.

My morning run was very average, which was better than I expected after a busy day and short night (and actually lowered my average by a second because today displaced a slightly slower Monday time). Fruit and coffee, and about to shower and get ready for a day of undefined [in]activity. Sermon is mostly done. Essay and presentation… a different story.

I keep deciding to allow myself to take a day off running, and I keep going ahead to run. Sometimes it’s just force of habit, which is fine with me; sometimes it’s because I don’t want to lose momentum toward fitness; sometimes I start out expecting to settle down into a walk, but get home without actually having slowed down (not that I’m going fast in the first instance). Today’s run turns out exactly to have matched the time it displaced from five days ago, so it didn’t affect my rolling average at all. It continued a plateau pace slightly better than ten minutes for each mile — no great shakes, but nice and steady.

Coffee, fruit, clean up, Morning Prayer, home for a bit, then back to St Helen’s for a baptism (‘of Such as are of Riper Years’), then home, then over to St Michael’s to deacon the Mass for the Assumption for Fr Paul.

Yesterday’s research/writing (about extramarital sexual activity in first-century Palestine) kept turning up angles and subtleties that would require another whole research programme to explore. I hate to leave stones unturned, but in order to get this presentation done I will — frustratingly — have to leave most of them unexamined. Plus, Sunday’s sermon, my Anglican essay, and I didn’t mention, but Nate will spend the weekend here on his way back home from Marseille. Yes, I am looking forward to retiring.

My run this morning felt good — steady, comfortable (I mean, granted that I was running), and at the better end of the spectrum of average runs. Nothing remarkable, but good.

Margaret will spend today in Headington; I’ll stay around Abingdon to oversee the ladies (Minke and Flora). More time to read and write, and to mull over Sunday’s sermon.

My morning run was a bit slower than average (not surprising, in the recent heat wave), then hot breakfast, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, then to public office hours at Throwing Buns, then to a staff meeting (would have been at the parish centre but we decided to enjoy coffee at Throwing Buns, so I stayed put), picked up some hoummus on the way home, ate lunch, then more of the same reading and writing.

Not my colleague the Hebrew Bible scholar, but the day I will be devoting time to my conference paper on ‘John, Jesus, and Jolene’ for this year’s BNTS conference in Manchester. I woke up and ran, another average day. Fruit and coffee, shower, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, then research and write on the problem of the Samaritan woman of John 4.

Satisfactory run this morning, still improving my rolling average (though that’ll end next time, since this morning’s average run displaced a slow morning five runs ago); coffee and fruit, showered and dressed, Morning Prayer, public office hours at R&R in the market square, morning email and digital paperwork. Nothing timetabled for the afternoon, so I’ll see about knocking out some more words for my essay (presentation is doing well enough pro tem.