Month: December 2025

My morning run had the interesting mathematical property of, being added into the five-day rolling average, being exactly equal to the resulting average. That presumably makes it a profoundly average run, which sounds true to what I experienced. Fruit and coffee, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, then home to care for the ladies while Margaret goes to Ipswich today for a funeral. I’ll do some laundry and go to Waitrose for some groceries, maybe even get some work done toward The Last Essay.

It reminded me of Lockdown days again. Two days of (roughly) ten hours a day sitting at a screen, holding high-stakes remote meetings — stiff from sitting still for long stretches, not having time/weather to run in the mornings, eyes glazed from screen-staring, mind numb from the comprehensive restraints: if you want important decisions made wisely, you must not think this cultivates an effective human institution.

In recovery mode, I ran this morning in dry, mild-for-December temps; my pace reflects my relatively inert start to the week (after a whirlwind weekend). Coffee and hot breakfast, a follow-up cup of decaf, and in a while I’ll clean up and go to Morning Prayer. I’ll have a meeting with the Rector, then the Chapter Meeting, then come home and maybe even take a nap (and dream of the next step of The Last Essay). It pleases and relieves me to re-enter (New Yorker:reënter) incarnate life.

Rain, no run. Coffee, fruit, coffee, toast, interviewing all day.

Three parish events, two sermons, seven miles yesterday, so I granted myself a morning ewalk instead of running. I had to walk at least, since I’ll spend most of today in front of my screen participating in admissions interviews. I’ll post the sermons as soon as I have breathing time to correct typos, etc. For now, it’s off to the online world (remember when Mark Zuckerberg tried to persuade everyone that the future of Facebook and the whole internet was ‘the metaverse’?).

Morning run in drizzle, then genuine light rain, then just ‘rain’, but I made it in a very good time. Fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, Mass at St Michael’s, home, then off to The Cosener’s House for the annual St Nic’s Patronal lunch, home, and I’m about to go preach at the patronal Solemn Evensong, then home to collapse in a heap (and spend the next two days interviewing for Oriel). Wheeee!

I didn’t run this morning — part of my strategy to be kinder to my knees, giving them time to recover from several runs and a lot of walking this week. Moreover, we were out last night with several wonderful friends whom we see less often than really we ought to, and gin and wine and after-dinner whisky flowed (all in moderation, of course).

Hot breakfast this morning, Morning Prayer, and now I need to finish two homilies and prepare for interviews Monday and Tuesday. I look forward to having some time to relax and unwind, but it seems increasingly likely that won’t come till after Christmas — no surprise there, but quite a push to get through the next three weeks while staying in top form pastorally.

Thirty-nine: I suppose that I mainly associate 39 with its factors, 3 × 13, or three full suits of a deck of cards. Apparently it has a variety of mathematical properties of which I have no grasp whatsoever. Apart from that (oh, and several film and television series that I haven’t seen), its main feature seems to be that it’s next before forty.

One evening thirty-nine years ago, on behalf of Bishop Alden Hathaway of Pittsburgh, the Rt Revd Robert Appleyard laid hands on me and the Holy Spirit (we trust) made me a priest. Over those years I’ve served congregations in New Haven, Durham (NC), St Petersburg and Tampa, Princeton and New Brunswick (NJ), Evanston, Glasgow, Oxford, and now Abingdon; I’ve been formed by work with wiser and more experienced clergy (and parishioners!). I’ve prayed and led sacramental worship from more prayerbooks and supplements than I can count, in three very different national churches (four, if we count in my service to the Kirk at Trinity College).

From where I stand now, I can see the banners and ribbons at the end of this stage of the Tour d’AKMA — not the end of the race, but the end of a stage, and with the support of my rector and wardens, I will retire from parish ministry next year on the fortieth anniversary of my ordination. I’ll miss the ministry I’ve grown into here in Abingdon, especially being recognisably a vicar to the people in the town whom I see day on day, but I’m tired. I have other work to do, that time will make more challenging the longer I keep putting it off.

I’m not sure how I’ll continue my priestly ministry, but I’ll keep up tutoring for Oriel as long as they’ll have me. Margaret and I will find a house, the first time in our lives that we’ve chosen where we live. We will, heaven permitting, settle into a different texture of life together, and discover what ‘leisure’ might really be like. I’ll read, and I’ll write. I’ll grow in my love for God, for my best beloved, and together we’ll visit Nate, Si, and Pippa in the US (as long as we can). And I’ll find some congregation, somewhere, and learn to pray with them as I have learned to pray with rural, urban, academic, cathedral, and town congregations throughout the US, Scotland, and England. Thanks be to God!

My morning run in 0° frosty air felt fairly good, and when I got home and the caffeine began to do its work, I found that my time this morning came in just one second slower than yesterday’s, which means that three of my last four runs were within one second of each other, all almost exactly on average (barring Tuesday’s slow day). I think that spells P – L – A – T – E – A – U. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, home to work on Sunday homilies, in to Oxford for the New Testament seminar, then home for the evening — heaven permitting, with all my homilising sorted.

An almost precisely average morning run today, and all my joints and muscles felt reasonable: no stiffness, no tightness, no aches. I’d be pleased if my breathing were improving, but I would not be surprised if I’ve just hit a plateau for a man in his late 60s, for which fair play. Coffee and fruit, cleaning up, Morning Prayer, public office hours, then home — spending the day working on the two homilies I’ll preach on Sunday.

Look, I have a lot of sympathy for Chris Frantz’s perspective on dealing with David Byrne in the context of a band — but…

Title says it all, really. Coffee and hot breakfast, Morning Prayer, public office hours at R&R, staff meeting, home for various and sundry…

(From BlueSky) Margaret & I went Advent-calendar wild this year. I’m still working with last year’s Diamine inks from Inkvent, so that was out; I chose a black tea calendar for her. She then found a gin calendar for me, and I added a dark chocolate calendar for her. And she found a clue-a-day mystery calendar for us to share.
Day One of the gin calendar is Silent Pool gin, of which the Gin Guild description is good. I noted the juniper right away, and thought I detected elderberry. Strong medicinals, clean and sharp straight-up gin. I was pleased — I thought it might favour a twist of lime in a G&T, or a bitter orange. Strong approval.
Margaret wouldn’t want to test her Whittard’s Christmas-themed black tea at night, but her chocolate pleased her very much. The calendar doesn’t give any information about its particulars, though.
We watched a video and opened the ‘newspaper’ for the first day of our mystery. The company required us to accept cookies for online clues we had already paid for, which to my mind is not a good start. Margaret, though, has already combed the evidence for clues and has taken extensive notes.

In this morning’s run, I couldn’t begin getting loose until my legs were tired, and the combination meant a distinctly sluggish run. After I started, after just a quarter mile or so, I considered giving up on the run and just walking the rest of the distance, but I thought my legs might get loose in another quarter mile or so, and I kept running. This was not a good idea.
Since my knees are beginning to feel achey on a regular basis, I’ve started wondering what I might do to keep exercising if I gave up street running. (I’m also holing open the possibility that my knees still resent the hard landings on the treadmill in our Boston hotel.) Very few modes of exercise will be as convenient as just stepping out the front door and running, but old people such as I* can’t just bang their legs onto pavement every day for an indefinite future.

* I saw a squib about drawing young people to church recently, one of the points of which was engaging young clergy in leadership of that process, and I started to think it was a great idea and I should think about participating in such a venture…. I did catch myself after only a few split seconds of that folly.

Happy St Andrew’s Day [yesterday], transferred!

My morning run came in at a nearly perfectly average pace, which I consider a victory indeed: the temperature was 10° but felt like 1° (because of wind), the aforementioned wind swirled around my route so that at some points I felt as if a giant hand was gently pushing me backward (and at other times I must have been pushed forward, though I couldn’t feel that), a light rain obscured my glasses, my quads (I think) resisted rather than bounded, and so on.

Coffee and fruit, I’ll come home after Morning Prayer to begin work on Sunday’s two sermons (morning Mass and St Nic’s Solemn Evensong for our patronal), and sorting email and obligations. (Nope — I forgot that I’m on deck to write this week’s newsletter squib about John the Baptist, which should be done today or tomorrow… plus the two sermons.)