Month: February 2026

I had expected rain this morning, but nothing was falling when I woke up, so I tackled the miles once again. No great progress today; just another day at my current plateau. No hot breakfast (even though it’s Wednesday) because it didn’t fit with the way my morning routine took shape. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, an interval, then Chapter Meeting and Preaching Workshop.

My pace picked up by a half minute this morning. While I often observe that it’s hard to predict whether I’m running more rapidly than usual (or less), this morning it felt very clear to me that my run was different from yesterday’s. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, bus to Oxford, coffee, tutorial, lunch, then home.

I’m listening to the chilled-out playlist at my home café in Oxford, and realising that the tune that’s on now is the already pretty chill David Byrne (X-Press 2) single ‘Lazy’.

If it doesn’t segue to a peppier song soon, I may be so chilled I’m comatose.

Oh no, now it’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. I’m too chilled to give that an exclamation mark.

Clear morning, and it hasn’t rained since sometime last night, so the circumstances for my run were pretty favourable. Still, I’m stuck at my current post-ankle plateau, more than a minute slower than I’d been running before the injury. Ah, well — I’m just doing it.

Dave likes ice cream. I used to enjoy ice cream myself; I still do, on the rare occasions I allow myself a scoop; I’m more susceptible to the temptations of salty snacks, though. Dave has given me some wistful memories of generous bowls of delicious ice cream, though, which I hadn’t really brought to mind for a long time.

Was I confused, or did I hear that Bad Bunny listened to a presidential press conference and said, ‘Nobody understands a word this guy is saying’?

I did dodge any of today’s predicted rainfall this morning, for a pace that was a bit faster than recent, but not a patch on my fair-weather, regular-exercise, pre-injury pace. No matter; the point of the exercise lies in doing it, not in speed (or for that matter, grace, which for me would be a lost cause). Coffee, fruit, last-minute revisions to this morning’s homily, shower, dress, and in a few minutes off to St Michael and All Angels. Then back home for lunch, then back to St Michael’s for a baptism, then home for the day.

Really! Rain again this morning, so I didn’t run. Indeed, having had a night of intermittent sleep, I went directly to coffee and hot breakfast, and to clearing email. Being prevented from running exasperates me particularly because I don’t enjoy it, because I do it for my general health; if I were just going to evolve into a potato, I’d rather it not happen just because the weather is bad. But that’s probably just my idiosyncrasy.

Speaking of hot breakfast, a while ago we had a visitor who cooked something in our cast iron pan, then washed it with hot water and detergent, perhaps even with steel wool (I wasn’t there, which — given my inability to conceal my immediate responses, is very much just as well). This disrupted the finish of the pan, and I turned to Jeff Ward (the blogger, not one of the very numerous other bearers of Jeff’s honourable name) (as is increasingly the case, of course, I couldn’t remember the name of Jeff’s blog so as to make the link, so I went to wood s lot (where I knew, correctly, that I would find him) and felt a wave of sadness that Mark is no longer doing the glorious work of finding and sharing noteworthy posts from around Blogaria — but it was good to click a few of Mark’s blogroll links and to learn that some of the stalwarts are still a-blogging, and remember the abandoned blogs of many who aren’t), as I say, I turned to Jeff, a man who appreciates tools and treating them with respect, and he gave me helpful advice toward nursing the finish of the pan back to its customary functional well-being. That was about six years ago, and the pan has been fine steadily, once it attained its useful finish. Last Wednesday, though, I must have oiled it unevenly (or perhaps a contaminant seasoning intruded on the ecology of the pan surface) and the pan started sticking again, for the first time in years. Ah, well, back to the remediation process.

I have to cook up a sermon for tomorrow, and I need to sort the readers’ version of the St Matthew Passion before Lent even begins, and I may have some other tasks I’ve forgotten — but I have my tutes arranged and room-assigned for the second half of the term, and Fourth Week hasn’t even begun, so there’s that.

I heard on the BBC yesterday morning that there are locations in Britain on which it had rained every day of 2026 (presumably including frozen precip as ‘rain’). The weather here has not been so extremely inclement, but it did rain again this morning during my running time, so I stayed warm and dry indoors. Coffee, fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, checked for phone messages at the Parish Centre (yes, we have a messaging set-up that requires in-person attention), home for coffee and toast. I’ve been conducting some hard-drive hygiene with a view to adding the editors’ requested paragraphs to The Last Essay.

Later I expect I’ll go in to Oxford for the New Testament Seminar, then home and back to Parish Centre again to check for afternoon messages, then home for the day. Not a lot of excitement, but at least I’m not in the Epstein Files. (I typed that before I looked — nope, not in them (not that I can think why I might be). Oxford is, mostly in reference to Ghislaine Maxwell’s undergraduate degree. Oriel isn’t. Margaret isn’t. I think we have no potential scandals on the horizon.)

I expected to take this morning off exercise, because I noticed last night that this morning held a 60% probability of precipitation. When I got out of bed, I checked the back garden (ground wet but not raining), so prepared for a run. Once I got outside and had run for about a quarter mile, I realised why the probability of precip was so high: it wasn’t raining, it was snowing. The snow didn’t accumulate, didn’t even last on the ground, but I definitely saw snowflakes in the beam of my headlight.

That said, the wind affected my pace considerably. Though I felt more limber, I ran against headwinds for a considerable part of the course, and came in at a slower pace than yesterday. Coffee, fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, and back to Enock House for coffee and toast.

Back in the parish, after a long travel day. We’re glowing from the beautiful examples of love and mutual encouragement that the principals showed us all, in church and especially in the formation and reinforcement of friendships.

But right now, we’re exhausted, brain dead, hungry and sleepy. See you tomorrow.

No particular exercise today apart from lifting fork or cup to mouth. I had a minor, miniature breakfast to tide me over. Then we packed up and boarded the L (I lived in Chicagoland for ten years, and I never noticed that the CTA called its rail service by the single letter rather than ‘El’). Because of Chicago geography and the overall structure of the CTA, we rode all the way down to the Loop and then out again to the venue for a truly splendid (very vegetarian/vegan/gluten-free friendly) brunch, and a last chance to chat with other friends and relations of Nick and Noël, and then onto the L again to O’Hare. Will be interested to see what new films February brings to the seat-back screens.

We’ll be back in Abingdon tomorrow. Cheers to our godson and all involved in yesterday’s brilliant celebration.