With so little time at home, I’ve also had very little time to post anything to the Ink Desk. I thought, therefore, that a brief explanation of my absence from both home and the website might be in order.

Last week I was in New England, first at Thomas More College in New Hampshire and then at a Catholic parish in Stowe, Vermont.

At Thomas More College, I taught Wilde’s Dorian Gray as part of my British Romanticism course and also was one of the faculty examiners at several Junior Project Defences, which included topics such as Hopkins’ poetry, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Lewis’s critique of scientism, and Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede. What a joy to be part of such a vibrant life of the mind! And what a joy to be able to teach such intelligent and enthusiastic young Catholics!

Having finished my week of teaching at TMC, I drove north into the mountains of Vermont to speak at Blessed Sacrament parish, the pastor of which is none other than Fr. Benedict Kiely, a fellow Englishmen-in-exile, who will be know to readers of StAR as one of our regular columnists.  

Returning home on Sunday, I managed to grab a blissful day off yesterday, during which I took my six-year-old daughter up to the mountains. We paddled in a pool at the foot of a waterfall, hiked to another waterfall, and ate ice cream.

Tomorrow I leave for Spain, giving talks to promote the Spanish edition of my book Race with the Devil and also lecturing on Shakespeare and Thomas More at universities in Barcelona and Madrid. In between the lectures, I’ll be attending the wedding of my good friend, Richard Aleman of the Chesterton Society and the Society for Distributism to his fiancée, Jessica, at a villa somewhere in the wilds of Catalonia. 

Life is exhausting and exhilarating and hopefully exonerates me for my occasional leaves of absence from the Ink Desk.