AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I ran both yesterday and today, two miles, yesterday proceeding to R&R for coffee after Morning Prayer. We then made our way to HSBC to open a new account, into which we can deposit cheques from US sources (a difficulty with TSB, which seems actively to be discouraging people from banking with them these days). Today we don’t have that sort of excitement in view; I’ll make a couple of Zoom calls and devote the rest of my time to a funeral sermon, and Margaret has business in Oxford.

One of the peculiar feelings attendant on Holly’s death involves my being the last living witness to the early life in our family. Dad died, Mom, now Holly, and of everything from the time we spent together, all eighteen years or so, I’m the only one who knows. I can’t say to anyone, ‘Say, remember when…’ or ‘Was it this way or that?’ Especially for someone as non-memorious as I, that’s a disorienting feeling.

Not just a song by the Eagles (‘f***ing Eagles, man’), not just something I remember my dad saying, but my approach to my two miles this morning. I woke up feeling washed out, my muscles and joints loose but not really limber, not feeling any energy surge at the beginning of the day; I walked most of my two miles, then, and it was comfortable and beautiful (though few things are as beautiful my crack-of-dawn run, real run, yesterday morning). I walked and watched what was going on around me, ran a few paces when I felt like it, and satisfied my felt need to keep my body moving first thing in the morning.

I process emotion in complicated ways, and I had been holding on to a lot of stress and tension between my sister Holly’s death in April and the Mass of Requiem I said for her yesterday morning, with a dear handful of the faithful from St Helen’s. For all my dissatisfied suspicion about the discourse of needing closure, yesterday’s Mass was the correct, fitting cadence to the protracted interval of suspended grief and tension.

Two miles each of the last two mornings. I made a hot breakfast yesterday, so it was fruit this morning. Coffee, of course, shower and in to church. Yesterday I arrived for Morning Prayer; this morning I arrived very early to set up the Lady Chapel for a small Low Mass of a Requiem for my sister. That went smoothly and well — it was the right thing, a relief, the right ending of this interval of grief.

As to the rest, I have a sermon to write for Sunday and a funeral to plan for next week, some emails and general correspondence to catch up on. But the end of the week is here.

Yesterday and today, two miles each. Fruit breakfast, shower, Morning Prayer (at church yesterday, at home today), finished paperwork, caught up (somewhat) on email, and so on and so forth. Monday was a long trip to Church House in Kidlington; this morning will be a Zoom conference to wrap up my orientation as a priest new to parish ministry in Oxford Diocese. Then Chapter Meeting at the church, then a meeting with Fr Paul to talk about funerals, then a pastoral call. Good thing this is a part-time post!

Isn’t it odd that characters in television crime dramas never seem to have seen any television crime dramas?

The spouse always takes offence when the police interview them, as if they didn’t know that the investigators ought to interview everyone connected with the crime. The family shouts at the police for not arresting a suspect after just a day (and they usually shout at a beleaguered underling, not the relevant managing officer), as if they were completely unaware that a city police department might have responsibilities other than solving one case. The characters don’t have the faintest familiarity with police procedure.

Even granted that serials don’t represent ‘actual’ police procedure, characters ought at least to have an appropriately distorted media image of how the police pursue a case. And that’s before you even count the romanticised image of honest, hard-working cops (with a few bad apples they’re trying hard to root out) — didn’t anyone learn from The Wire?

I really did not want to run this morning, but I ran anyway. Coffee and fruit breakfast, Morning Prayer, then a trip to Kidlington for a lunch at Church House, then home to clean up marking. Not a thrill-packed day, but it accomplished what was required.

My morning run started slow, but I got into a good rhythm on Park Road and thought I would stretch out my run a little bit, maybe draw it close to two and a half miles, so I crossed Stratton Way and ran east to Stert, ran down to St Nic’s, turned down East St Helen’s, and reconnected wtih my usual route at church. When I got home and remembered to look up the exact extra mileage, it turned out to be almost exactly the same distance as my usual route. It was just the unfamiliarity of the route that engendered the intuition that it would be longer. Oh well, two more miles in the book of life.

Margaret and I sat in the sun and took lunch at the Riverside Café, which was lovely; then we meandered back to town, and enjoyed a leisurely round at the King’s Head and Bell. As we were leaving the pub, a gent from another table (Margaret and I both thought he looked like Jason Momoa) stopped me and said, ‘Hey, man, I really like your look!’ So there’s that.

Now to bang away at tomorrow’s sermon…

Stiff all over after shifting books around yesterday (not just loading the three bookshelves, but also moving book boxes out from Margaret’s library and my closet out to get them in position to shelve), so my morning run was slow; I felt as though all my motion was restricted, everything was tight. Still, the weather was pleasant, and I haven’t missed a day since the rain stopped.

Now that I have two time-ambiguous jobs, I notice that one of the big time costs of my work involves the interplay of emails and timetables. If I were a shop clerk, I’d have set hours and fulfil them by arriving at and leaving the shop. Now that I’m somewhat on-call for two posts, I spend a lot of time answering emails, planning this meeting and that, changing plans, and shifting my attention from sermon prep to pastoral news to marking to answering students’ queries, and all this time is invisible to outside auditing, and task-switching leaks time through start-up and wind-down efforts. Hey, I love Oriel and I love the Abingdon Parish, no doubt. I’m just (re-)affirming what part-time workers have known all along, that part-time work costs the worker more tie than just the compensated hours.