Wrapping Up, Part Two
By the time I remembered I was supposed to sign up for worship at Old St Paul's, I was too late, so this morning I went to the Cathedral. It's my last Sunday in Edinburgh (for now). Tomorrow I take the train down to London; on Tuesday I fly home.
So today is about getting ready to leave, taking care of unfinished business, and taking stock. The first bit of unfinished business was a print in the window of one of the galleries in Stockbridge that I had decided to buy. So after the service I walked down to Stockbridge. Ah, the Stockbridge Market is open. There's nothing in the fridge; maybe I'll find something I want for lunch. And behold! a booth selling Scotch eggs. I had just been thinking that I hadn't had a single Scotch egg the whole time I've been here. That's lunch sorted. And then there was a bakery stall, where I found a piece of cake that surely could not be as delicious as it looked, but the experiment seemed worth conducting.
But that does bring up the other piece of unfinished business: cleaning the flat. I will even have to clean the oven, because I've actually used it. I'm thinking an hour and a half should be enough for all of it. It's my least favorite part.
Curtailed and restricted though it was because of the pandemic, this trip has been a splendid success. Sure, there was very little eating out; there were no plays, no concerts, no gallery visits, no daily Evensong at the Cathedral. IASH was a ghost town: no weekly Fellows' Lunch, research-in-progress seminars conducted virtually. I won't be sticking around as I had planned to for the Christmas and Hogmanay celebrations, which have been canceled anyway. But this stay in Edinburgh has been everything I needed it to be, and some things that I hadn't even thought to look for.
What I needed most of all was a time of refreshment after a year of being overstretched and overstressed. I have certainly had that. Just being in Scotland, enjoying the beauty of Edinburgh, exploring the Highlands and Islands, has replenished my soul. My retreat at the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield fed my spirit. I am feeling . . . whatever the opposite of burned out is. I will approach the new liturgical year and the new semester with renewed energy.
I also needed to get some work done, and that happened too. I met the deadlines I had -- relatively minor stuff, but it's always gratifying to be done with something -- and secured contracts for two monographs and an edited volume. I'm particularly excited about getting the contract for Anselm: A Very Short Introduction from Oxford University Press. I made the kind of progress on the Scotus book that makes me feel confident I really do have new stuff to say, and that I can say it with some degree of panache. Truth be told, I've done about as much on that as I can do without access to my books and the USF library, so the time is probably right for me to head home so that I don't lose momentum.
What I hadn't looked for was this incredible feeling of physical well-being. I hadn't been here long at all when I realized that I'm in better shape than I was five years ago, before my health fell apart. It suits me sometimes to think of myself as a middle-aged invalid, but at 53 I am less easily winded and have noticeably greater endurance than I had at 48. If you had told me a year ago -- heck, if you had told me six months ago -- that I would be deliberately seeking out as many hills as possible to walk up, that I would be traveling to various parts of Scotland with the primary agenda of walking as much as possible, I couldn't have believed you. But so it is.
I even got a couple of ideas for podcasts, though nothing may come of those. We'll see. I'm so bursting with energy right now that I'm in danger of overcommitting myself.
Which is how I got here in the first place.
I'll try to keep that in mind.
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