WFH: DAY 74. 6.00 am: Awake, and had been since 5.30 am. I’m not sure whether this is a Summer or an isolation phenomenon. I was at my desk by 7.00 am, returning emails, submitting resit advice, and orientating myself to the day ahead. The morning is noticeably warmer and more humid than it has been. 9.30 am: The first…

WFH: DAY 73. 7.30 am: 8.15 am: A communion. 9.00 am: Admin would dominate my day’s work. But it did not dominate my mind. To begin, I disinfected my inbox and arranged my tasks in order of priority and irksomeness. ‘Where possible, make admin serve the most elevated purposes: Do well. Do good. Do right. Encourage. Lift burdens. Relieve anxiety.…

WFH: DAY 73. 8.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am: I looked once more at the final paragraph of the writing, while searching for information on how musicians play together in lockdown. (In the background: John McLaughlin, Cindy Blackman Santana, and Carlos Santana’s ‘Quarantine Blues‘ — which was made under these conditions. Wonderful!) (Oh! And happy birthday Carlos, too!) Of course,…

‘We often can only survive if we keep on forgetting’ (Caroline Wilkinson) WFH: DAY 72. 6.15 am: 7.00 am: A communion. There’re times (I would wish for more) when prayer is driven by a powerful sense of imperative. Knowing the torpor and inconstancy of the heart, I recognise that the motive is bestowed rather than induced by the fiat of…

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil (Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’ (1877)) WFH: DAY 71. 8.00 am: A communion. 8.45 am: A deletion of spam and other bothersome unsolicited mail. After which, I ‘called-in’ on an ailing student. 9.00 am: Dark clouds gathered; rain fell intermittently. Second…

Is it not ironic that the bronze-cast statues of slave owners all have a dark-brown complexion. WFH: DAY 70. 7.30 am: A communion. 8.00 am: A review of the day ahead and tomorrow’s engagements. There was still much to do administratively. However, now was the time to also begin reclaiming some of the Summer period for my own work, and…

‘We have followed too much the devices, and desires of our own hearts’ (The Book of Common Prayer (1662)) WFH: DAY 69. 7.00 am: A communion. 7.45 am: A reflection on a first encounter: 8.30 am: I returned to writing PhD research monitoring reports before the first of the day’s conference calls began. My mind had been filled with plans: speculative, idealistic, and untestable prior…

While you can never go back, nevertheless you may yet go forward to another place, person, or time that’s very much like the one you’d left. Saturday, June 13. Thanksgiving. Observation. Remembrance. ‘To begin at the beginning’. I’d assembled an album dedicated to me after my parents had died, using photographs from my mum’s ‘archive’ (Two shoeboxes.) Over the years,…

There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother (Proverbs 18.24) WFH: DAY 67. 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Email roundup. With the undergraduate and taught-course postgraduate marking complete and awaiting ratification at the exam board meeting, only the research postgraduates, and their blessed monitoring round, remained ahead of me. The admin structure for that was now in place. One…

‘Oh happy day! Oh happy day!’ (Philip Doddridge (1701–51)) WFH: DAY 66. 4.00 am: ‘When morning gilds the sky’, the birds sang a paean of praise in thanksgiving for the new day. 6.30 am: 7.15 am: Breakfast: 8.30 pm: A communion. I determined to slip into the day softly and quietly, so as to preserve that incomprehensible peace which had…