Got up promptly, ran my miles, though with a peculiar interruption. Margaret gently indicated that I ought to wear a headlight through the winter, so I’ve been using the headlight that came to us from clearing her mother’s house a couple of years ago. This morning I was adjusting it as I ran, and evidently I shifted the light from its secure position clipped to the headbands, and as I continued my run, the light-and-battery assemblage fell from my head and scattered in the street. I paused my timer (after several false starts, the ‘pause’ button being difficult to hit precisely), gathered all the loose bits, stuffed them into my pocket, and ran a few paces, then turned on the timer again. In the moment, I was sure — I am still pretty confident — that I didn’t make up all the time lost by stopping and trying to pause the timer, but I reasoned that it’s doing the thing that matters, not setting any world speed records, so I ran onward in the expectation that I had lost a half minute or more on my usual two-mile pace.
As it turns out, my time was perfectly average for the past few weeks, and I can attest that I was running harder than usual both before and after the headlight interruption. So there we are — it’s well possible that my time would have been even zippier if I hadn’t had to stop.
Rushed coffee and shower, went with Margaret to the eight o’clock at St Helen’s, then coffee, fruit, and toast with two of the gourmet butters that Margaret gave me for Christmas (one for each slice, not mixed; I’m not a savage!).
Yesterday afternoon I made significant progress on The Last Essay, really startling progress (to me); I’ll see what I can chisel away today, too, and will see about finally posting my Christmas sermons.