Category: Uncategorized

Morning miles at the best pace I’ve attained since the beginning of May, coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, and public office hours at R&R. Uncertain what will ensue.

Dinnae run, slept late. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, coffee and toast, lunch, and soon off to sit with one of the world’s greatest little girls, then to anniversary time with Margaret.

Looks as though I’ve fallen into the pattern of blogging alternate days, which I’ll try to ramp up tomorrow and Saturday. In the meantime, I ran both mornings (before the rain started) to mediocre times. Yesterday I cooked a hot breakfast; this morning, coffee and fruit. After Wednesday’s Morning Prayer, I came home for a bit, then returned to church for the weekly staff meeting. Then I spent the afternoon working on an outline, and handouts, for the teaching day at Church House (Oxford) (more precisely, Kidlington) on ‘Freedom and Liberation in Romans’.

This morning, Morning Prayer went by very quickly, and I had dreams to hopping onto the 9:40 X3 through Abingdon and coasting into Oxford with time galore to go back over the points I wanted to emphasise in a morning revision with my first-years. Thames Travel and Oxford Buses had different ideas, though, and sent no bus through until after 10:00, and didn’t get me to Oxford till unnervingly close to my 11:00 revision. Came home, worked on one of the topics I discussed with the first-years (Western non-interpolations, about which I didn’t remember as much as I thought I did), and kept up with correspondence.

And I’ll try to blog tomorrow, even if it’s just my running and breakfast reports.

I didn’t run yesterday morning because of rain. Morning Prayer, public office hours at R&R, and later the funeral for our parishioner Peter Cannon-Brookes.

Ran this morning, slightly improving Sunday morning’s time. Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer, then off to Oxford to talk with my former student Matthew Eddy, whose daughter is doing her undergraduate degree at Oxford. Then back home to Margaret.

All of which is overshadowed by the deaths on Sunday of Margaret’s Aunt Jan, on her father’s side, and Monday of her Uncle Roy, on her father’s side. It has been a hard, heavy summer so far.

Slept long (for me) and woke with barely enough time to take my morning run, shower off, and go to the 8:00 service, which is my favourite for Sundays on which I’m not on duty. The run was all right, not good and not bad, and I didn’t have time for coffee before. I was still, ahem, glowing when I got to church. Home for coffee and toast, for email errands (do they ever abate?) and time to let the muscles in my back and shoulders relax….

Another thread from last week’s BlueSky:

In the AI/anti-AI discourse, I haven’t seen enough treatment of the problem of ‘feeling’. A silicon-based ‘intelligence’ can’t feel as a human does: it can simulate touch, but not experience touch; it can calculate a response to visual stimuli, but it can’t see. And above all, it can’t have what in humans we call ‘feelings’. At best, it can call up a response that it has learned would be most probable if humans were to encounter particular circumstances — a break-up, death in the family, a favourable job offer — but there’s nothing internal (as it were) to the electronics that produces the thing a human feels. Nor, all the more, mixed feelings.
Now, I don’t put any stock in a feeling-mysticism that treats art objects as if imbued with wooooo ‘authentic feelings’ — but it seems vital to me that we distinguish the algorithmic processes that display a probable response similar to what a vast, fine-grained database implies a human would feel, from the human feelings themselves. You can’t surprise a computer. You can’t charm a computer. You can only submit input that you calculate will induce AI to guess at a human-seeming response.

To which Ryan Turnbull responded: ‘If an AI could speak, we couldn’t understand it.
– Wittgenstein, probably’.

Also, my most-frequently-played musicians for May:

1 Echo & the Bunnymen 7 scrobbles
2 Iron & Wine 7
3 The Beatles 7
4 The Who 7
5 Bruce Springsteen 6
6 Elvis Costello 6
7 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds 6
8 The Rolling Stones 6
9 Van Morrison 6
10 The Clash 5

As always, I omit the Mountain Goats because they’d end up at or near the top every month. That’s partly because I am a big fan, but also because of the vast catalogue they’ve produced and the number of concert recordings I’ve retrieved.

No run this morning; it was raining, with warnings of continuing rain, and I opted to stay home with hot coffee rather than run through chilly drizzle. My inclination was confirmed by the possibility that I’ll modulate to a more gentle schedule for running, perhaps running only alternate days.

Then hot breakfast, Morning Prayer, and catching up on email and general internet errands.

The title above refers to the fact that I’m not rota-ed to serve at any of Sunday’s services, so that I may be able actually just to recharge this weekend. I’m not counting on anything, but it’s possible.

With leaden, achey legs, I ran my morning route more than a minute slower than Wednesday — but la, there we are, I still got the exercise. Coffee and fruit, a shower, Morning Prayer, a quick grocery stop, home to tackle some emailing, off to Oxford for the New Testament seminar and a book launch. The book launch, though, had taken place yesterday, so onward to home again. I arrived in time to help Margaret customise her new clothes for tonight’s Leavers’ Dinner at St Stephen’s House; I stayed home and made sure the ladies were not dissatisfied by life.

No runs yesterday or today because of the intermittent heavy rain. Yesterday I had my hot breakfast, today coffee and fruit; Morning Prayer both days. Yesterday I celebrated the midweek Communion at St Helen’s (then bounced over to the staff meeting), today I will celebrate the Corpus Christi parish Mass at St Michael’s (didn’t/won’t preach at either). Keeping busy with emails and with preparing a holy card for Clement of Alexandria.

Last evening we tuned in to a videocast of the requiem for a beloved friend of ours. Margaret had decided not to fly out to attend in person, in part because we knew the service would be shown online. As matters fell out, the bishop’s portable microphone wasn’t connecting to the A/V device; since she had the primary role in the service and gave a eulogiacal homily from her own long acquaintance with our friend, we watched almost the entire service without hearing a syllable of what was going on. What we had hoped would be an occasion for releasing grief and binding our hearts with those of others turned into an hour of vexation.

No run this morning, because it was raining heavily. It hasn’t often been raining heavily during my running window; of course, it hasn’t been raining much at all in England, and I have run in light rain, but today stands out for having had honest-to-goodness rainy rain. Glad for our soil and plants, even if I’d have liked to stretch my legs.

Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, some Clement of Alexandria.

I ran my morning miles at a surprisingly good time (I was surprised, anyway) despite feeling dead-legged and oxygen-starved. I seem to be getting back into a groove.

Coffee and fruit, shower, Morning Prayer, public office hours at R&R, home to the dogs, and this evening out to Oriel for a Chapel Dinner (I haven’t participated in chapel this year, though I may next year, but I’m delighted to have been invited).

Yesterday morning I walked and jogged to give my knees a break. Hot breakfast, and then spent much of the day working on an image of Clement of Alexandria for holy card purposes. I have the feeling that I committed a chunk of the day to some other purpose, but nothing comes to mind.

This morning I ran for time, improving over other recent runs. Fruit and coffee, shower, coffee and toast, off to Trinity Day Parish Eucharist at St Michael’s. I stayed around for a baptism after the Eucharist — a lovely service, with reinforcements from a half dozen couples and children who went through Birthing Classes together. Then, at last, I came home to relax with Margaret. A much-appreciated rest.

After several weeks of deviation from my, our, predictable pattern of a week’s days, today we draw near to a more usual plan. Indeed, my day will be almost perfectly ‘normal’; Margaret’s will depart from our usual Friday because she’ll attend the New Testament Seminar demonstrate respect for our part-time lodger Sam Tranter, who will give one of two presentations on “New Testament Ethics and Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order at 40.”

I’ll scamper home early, as usual, but M will linger after the presentation to participate in the Q-and-A and to go to the Royal Oak for post-seminar festivities.

It has been… a week.

Running first: I didn’t do any running while on retreat or in the USA for Aunt Harriet’s memorial service. Then when I got back home, I jog-walked Tuesday, ran very slowly yesterday, and ran to a slower usual time this morning. None of the injuries (now mostly all fine) from my fall were a factor; it was just the layoff after not exercising for two weeks.

The annual retreat with the Sodality was excellent as always. It’s interesting to observe who attends and who doesn’t; when I was governed by an academic schedule, I couldn’t get away for four days mid-term, so I didn’t participate at all, attending instead such Sodality Days as fit my Saturday-only schedule. Having modulated to parish work, wherein I have an annual retreat written into my Working Agreement, I’ve attended all of the last three years. A few of the original generation of Sodalists still take active part, but a significant number have changed circumstances such that the collegial spirit of the Sodality is less necessary, or the retreat less feasible, than it once was. (I’m a second-stage Sodalist, not able to get away to the founding retreat at Aylesford, but joining formally as soon as I had the opportunity — at a bespoke service at Lincoln College where our dear friend Mother Melanie was then Chaplain.) Newer members, though, have eagerly and energetically taken up the opportunity that the Sodality offers of Catholic worship in an inclusive spiritual community. It’s a good thing.

Then I flew to Boston, to Cambridge Massachusetts, for my Aunt Harriet’s memorial service. Harriet was particularly important to me, as she took over as my primary care-giver for an interval when my mother fell pregnant with Holly, and I was too much for her to deal with. I stayed at Gran‘s house, where Harriet and Nanny Harkness and Rosie and Gran herself watched over me — but primarily Aunt Harriet, unmarried and not yet having children of her own. I caught up there with my cousin Felicity, with Martitia, with Lisa and Peter Adams (not Adam relations), and of course with Uncle Bob, Alison, Rebecca, and Alison’s daughters Rosie and Isabelle. And I wept for Aunt Harriet, told stories, got to know Rosie and Isabelle better, checked in with Uncle Bob, and had long talks with Ali and Becca. This, too, was good — but sad. As more than one person observed, Harriet was the last of the four sisters (my Aunts Isabelle, Grace, Harriet, and my mother Nancy), and with them something profound has changed in the world that knew them.

Home from Boston on the overnight to Heathrow, slept all day Monday, then back full steam into ministry on Tuesday (even though I was running on only about half steam). When is the next holiday?

My annual retreat closes early today, as I leave Aylesford Friary for Cambridge, Massachusetts. The retreat continues till afternoon, but I’m catching a plane so as to arrive and be vaguely coherent for the memorial service for my Aunt Harriet. Then I’ll fly back to England and stagger through a busy pastoral week…

I didn’t run this morning, determined as I am to make the next three days of annual retreat a time of refreshment and renewal. I did make a cup of coffee, ate some fruit, checked on my packed goods, and left early for my train from Didcot Parkway Station. I caught a favourable train, arrived in Paddington, took the Tube to St Pancras where I ate a hearty lunch, and now am headed for Aylesford Priory for the annual retreat of the Sodality of Mary, Mother of Priests.

Yesterday, along with writing Friday’s blog entry, I walked my morning miles, joined in Morning Prayer, had coffee and a hot breakfast, worked on the beginnings of a sermon, took a break around midday, leaned into it again after lunch… Then Josiah called, which will be the topic of another post. By the time I pulled myself together, it was time for dinner, and I was no longer composing.

This morning I jogged and mostly walked, Morning Prayer, coffee and fruit, shower, finished the sermon (below), went to St Michael’s, then to Albert Lodge to visit Fr Keith Kinnaird. Then to the Riverside Cafe with Edie and her parents; she is four now, so we had presents for her. Home, where I packed up for my Sodality Retreat and for travel to the US for Aunt Harriet’s memorial service.
Continue reading “Wrapping the Weekend”

I missed posting yesterday. I jog-walked again, though my knees and ankles began barking at me. Coffee, fruit, Morning Prayer, then public office hours at R&R. I did some emailing, including my Ascension Day sermon (below), then home for lunch and I scampered to Oxford for Nick Moore’s talk on ‘Disaggregating the Ascension in Luke-Acts and Hebrews’. Thence I dashed back to Abingdon to chat with Margaret’s sister Jeanne, though we had to put that off for a few minutes to field a call from granddaughter Lydia. Sermons, scholarship, friends, family, Friday — what more can one ask?
Continue reading “Missed, And More”