Mile and a half this morning, fruit breakfast, refereeing, reading from The Cowley Fathers, reading for research, reading supplementary to refereeing, good news from my responsibilities at work. Al… | Continue reading
Two miles, breakfast at Rick’s, research reading, referee reading, requisite entertainment of Minke and Flora, more reading, a few more words. | Continue reading
Yesterday, a mile and a half, hot breakfast, more words (yay!), pleasure reading from The Cowley Fathers, and some family time (construing ‘family’ to include dogs). Today, just a mile, out of gent… | Continue reading
Today I was searching for a half-remembered baraita to the effect that if all Israel were to keep the Law for a single day, the Messiah would come — but I couldn’t call to mind enough of the exact … | Continue reading
Yesterday: a mile and half, fruit breakfast, and more research reading on the Bible in Catholic England. Today: two miles, hot breakfast, more research, but also a couple of paragraphs of writing (… | Continue reading
Two miles, plus reading. I realised this morning while I was running that I’m trying to master pre-Reformation hermeneutics, and that’s not really the pivot of this essay. The difficulty (for me) i… | Continue reading
Mile and a half, fruit breakfast, pre-Reformation hermeneutics — as much as I can read, surrounded by yapping dogs who harbour inexplicable demands. | Continue reading
Two mile run this morning, with a view to fitting in another two mile run later in the week — gradually escalating, I hope, to making two miles my daily norm. I was reminded this morning that one r… | Continue reading
Not me, neither for a holiday nor ecclesially, but only the Euro Championship — well earned, as the Italians gave a clinic in patient pressure on England’s defence for most of the game. And full ma… | Continue reading
Two-mile run; hot breakfast; Sunday Mass; some reading, some weeding, a long walk with Minke and Flora. The dogs were restive and irritable, though, and it was difficult to settle them for more tha… | Continue reading
Short run, since it was raining (about a mile); hot breakfast; long midday walk with Minke and Flora; reading in The Cowley Fathers; but mostly taking things easy and caring for the dogs. | Continue reading
Mile and a half; fruit breakfast; ‘Twelve Miracles,’ ‘Phinehas Rewarded’ in Legends III; time spent reading The Cowley Fathers; Long walk with Minke and Flora; Diego|Maradona in the evening, warmin… | Continue reading
Mile and a half; fruit breakfast; ‘Balaam’s Wicked Counsel,’‘Phinehas, Zealous for God’ from Legends III; research reading on pre-Reformation biblical interpretation in England; a fair amount lot o… | Continue reading
Yesterday’s tick-list of accountability includes my morning mile and a half, hot breakfast (at Rick’s, for the first time in months; Minke and Flora behaved very well); some reading on hermeneutics… | Continue reading
Two mile run (weighed in at 85kg), hot breakfast, ‘Balaam’s Hopes Disappointed,’ ‘Curses Turned to Blessings’ from Legends III, drudge work on converting ASCII to Unicode Greek in my textbook, read… | Continue reading
For yesterday’s accountability report: Mile and a half, fruit breakfast, three sections of Legends III (‘Balaam Runs into His Own Destruction,’ ‘Balaam with Balak,’ and ‘Balaam’s Sacrifices Refused… | Continue reading
Yesterday I ran my mile-and-a-half, transcribed the ‘Balaam’s Ass’ portion of Legends III, read a bit of The Cowley Fathers, started the first chapter of the hermeneutics monograph, read through th… | Continue reading
I last made regular use of this blog back when I was forming my habit of running — first weekly, then twice weekly, then daily — as a mode of keeping myself accountable. I kept track of time and co… | Continue reading
Just a note here to record the memory that I first set foot in England in the summer of 1972, on my way to study in France for a month with my colleagues from Allderdice High School (led and chaper… | Continue reading
Our college has been operating in person this term, after doing [almost] everything online last term. (Last term we kept the round of daily Masses in person for residents of the college — that is, … | Continue reading
A year ago (plus two days) Margaret and I entered into the strict lockdown that the PM was urging on us. I think it wasn’t yet required; at least it wasn’t the two days before, when Margaret went o… | Continue reading
Two new things today: the good news is that I received my notification from the NHS that they’re inoculating my age group for COVID, so if I can survive till next Monday, and then a few weeks for t… | Continue reading
This afternoon I’m going to Blackburn [digitally, alas] to give a talk on Mark’s Gospel (the gospel for Year B, apart from all the Sundays John elbows in) for a clergy teaching day. That circumstan… | Continue reading
Before so much of the data bearing on site visits, links in and out, analytics, and so on were locked away from curious civilians and reserved to Facebook and various advertising companies, I would… | Continue reading
I’ve been running daily, conducting my classes, tutorials, and meetings (all on Zoom) (not running on Zoom, I mean, but the rest of my work), and it entirely wipes me out. My eye is twitchy, the on… | Continue reading
The weather has warmed, and I’ve been running my full distance. Teaching has resumed, though this is the last week of teaching for assessed Common Awards classes here at St Stephen’s House; on the … | Continue reading
-4° again this morning, so I took a short run. The muscles over my cheekbones — especially the left side, the side of my face that was smashed when I was beaten up in secondary school — are twitchy… | Continue reading
St Stephen’s House observes a long weekend between Fourth and Fifth Weeks, with no college obligations from Thursday to Tuesday. I have a tutorial today, and a rescheduled staff meeting, but as of … | Continue reading
Down to -4° this morning, making this (I think) the longest consistently cold stretch I remember in our winters here. Yes, I’ve lived in Maine and Chicago and Connecticut, where 25° is no big deal,… | Continue reading
-3° and a light breeze, but I went ahead and set out for my run. I cut it short at a mile, though, because I’m not crazy. | Continue reading
So, I did run this morning, though it’s -2°. I intended just to run my mile, taking a short cut to avoid some less-travelled pavements, but I felt good enough and the pavements seemed clear enough … | Continue reading
I ran yesterday morning at 0°, but this morning it’s -2° and the pavements are crusted with occasionally-slippery frozen precipitation, and I am not so crazy as to risk falling, so it’s back to a n… | Continue reading
The weekend, I mean. I have work to do, but since I can’t get done as much work effectively during the week as the regular term requires, I will spend part of my Saturday and Sunday on business. Na… | Continue reading
And pandemanxiety. I’ve just felt entirely stretched thin over the past weeks — my various basic responsibilities have taken all the concentration and determination I can muster. At any given momen… | Continue reading
Yesterday morning, humid and chilly, I felt sluggish, my breathing laboured, my joints resistant (though to be fair, not painful); this morning, similar weather, comfortable energy level, breathing… | Continue reading
Three days in a row, very light rain, much to do, hard to focus. | Continue reading
So for the first day of my new running streak, which I’ll hope to break before it gets too ambitious, the weather went to frigid again (-1°) (but dry), I saw a very healthy-looking fox at teh… | Continue reading
The rain has been falling heavily since 5:30 (or earlier), so today I finally do end the streak. I’ll start again tomorrow, assuming it doesn’t rain. | Continue reading
Apparently the hour from five to six o’clock in the morning is a rain-free zone according to some meteorological rule governing Oxford. I keep planning to skip my run for a day when the Met Office … | Continue reading
Another zero-degree morning, another run, thirty-one days in a row. The psychology of the streak-running phenomenon, now that I’ve been made aware of streaks as a popular phenomenon, is brilliant a… | Continue reading
I didn’t expect to run this morning; the snow is still lying in the garden and on the garden path. But I looked out the front window and the pavement was clear, so I decided to give it a go. Everyt… | Continue reading
Yesterday made twenty-eight, today (before it snowed) twenty-nine days of running in a row; around 0° and slippery on the pavement yesterday, dry and subzero this morning, though about three cm of … | Continue reading
No desktop photoi this Friday; I’m working on one of our twin dining room tables, and don’t have the rest of my study to conceal paperwork. Twenty-seven days in a row. | Continue reading
Weather was rubbish this morning, and it’s been alternating handsome blue skies and grey downpours every 90 minutes or so ever since. I started my morning run in chilly weather with a firm wind, an… | Continue reading
I’m looking forward to the US having a president whom I can comfortably ignore for days, if not weeks, at a time. Thank you, America! I have been ravenously hungry in the mornings recently. In a se… | Continue reading
So, that happened. Today was my first full-on, for-credit, enrolled-students, part-of-a-formal-module online class. I won’t try to imagine what it was like for the students, but bits of it were eas… | Continue reading
Yesterday morning, Radio Four covered the progress of the government’s vaccination scheme in a feature on the ‘Broadcasting House’ programme. Toward the end of the segment, they interviewed beloved… | Continue reading
I hope you didn’t tear up your betting slips on my running streak, because it’s up to twenty-one, bay-bee! The weather turned lovely yesterday afternoon, and I decided to run in the afternoon after… | Continue reading