I decided today to go and be even more involved with Corpus Christi, in other words I went to Mass at the Chaplaincy. My intention was to try and be really thankful for all these lovely things that are happening in my life at the moment and to give thanks for my time here at Corpus Christi College. In the event I also ended up praying about another body - mine! because my left heel is so painful at the moment. The fact that I'm doing so much walking isn't helping, but I'm hardly not going to walk when I'm here, so I bought some pain-killing gel the other day and, as they say, I'll just keep taking the tablets as well.

Other than working on another two odes, and trying to make sense of an ever-increasing reading list, nothing else special happened today - oh, except that I've just eaten a delicious dinner, (rounded off with one of the smoothest glasses of port ever!)in the SCR and had some very interesting conversations with visiting academics from Bulgaria and Macedonia and a young tutor from Sheffield University. Liliana is a historian from Bulgaria and we plan to visit a really old pub tomorrow night (all in the interests of her research of course). Additionally, I found myself in the middle of a fascinating discussion with a Fellow from the English Department, about Tolkein and The Lord of the Rings. I told her that try as I might, I've never been able to get into it and I'd always felt slightly guilty about that. I felt much better after my discussion with her and most of the guilt has gone!

I also plan to meet up for coffee with the Poetry Stanza rep for Oxford tomorrow afternoon so that I can give her some idea of the poetry scene in the Tees Valley and she can tell me a bit of what's happening here, so I look forward to that.