Balancing essay writing, placement activity and birthday

This time the reporting will be thematic rather than weekly.


I have over the last fortnight been preparing for my supervision. This involved me deciding whether to re-write the article from the talk I gave at SLS or whether to write something fresh on the discourses around older age. The thing is that I am finding the literature rather poor and though I can find endless stuff on older age, it all reflects broad discourses from society in general rather than what I am seeing in the churches which are largely discourses crafted by older people themselves. It seems odd that somebody who is official studying older people in the church, has not spent time actually talking with them. He might analyse the NT, OT and early church well, he might even deal with the pressures in society well, but how do older people in the church construct themselves and how do others in the church construct them is a very lightly touched upon and seems to me to be the elephant in the room. Anyway I felt that unprepared to tackle that and I know that I really need to have my new computer here to handle the recordings that I decided that the revision was in order. Actually part of this was that I came across an article on small groups which had the actual article interspersed with scenes. As different parts of narrative I was using stood quite well on their own and the narrative did not have narrative tension as a whole I felt that reshaping things like this my be advantageous. I also needed to put in some very basic ethnographic stuff and also Reformed Liturgy stuff. Anyway I was at the stage when it was sent out to my proof readers, thanks Ruth and James, and then Martin, my supervisor found that he was fully booked on the date. So I am now in the process of rearranging the date of our meeting and sending him the essay to comment. I may well try and get something written on discourses around old age next weekend or at least some reading done.

Placement wise things are going well. I remember being amazed with St Andrews Chesterfield about how the access changed when I had been there over a year. This time I got a list of dates, times and meetings, plus I have spotted that evening services actually are a bit of an odd animal. It is low key but it is also one of the place where the informal discourse that runs the church goes on. The previous Sunday evening service they ended up deciding what they would do for the next while. It was suggested that they might follow a book. The initial suggestion was The Purpose Driven Life but when Mike Thomas checked that he found that it was not how he remembered it. So much to my relief they moved onto The Me I want to Be by John Ortberg. One day I was down town doing something that needed to do, and passed by our local CLC bookshop (yes I know, but it is the sole remaining Christian Bookshop in Sheffield). I went in to see if they had it, which they did, so I bought it and photocopied a portion of it so people had chance to prepare for this evening. Hopefully Mike will have ordered the copies by next time. Also I wrote an article for their quarterly magazine this time and mentioned their notice board was in need of a revamp, hoping very much that by the time it was out, nobody would have done it as it was several months ago that I actually checked it. It had not been. So when the fabric group got to view the board they agreed with me. The problem is that people who come to the church don’t see it regularly. They largely come by car, park in the car park and go straight into the church. However the noticeboard is the main physical presence for most people as the church is set back from the road. I also got another interview in on Friday, well I say an interview the lady just talked at me the whole time having read my questions in advance. She certainly had lots to say and I think having someone to listen was important.

Also since the bank holiday I have been doing the layout of a booklet published by the writers group I belong to. I enjoy doing layout. It is something that comes naturally. That can not be said of my copy-editing skill and therefore the most annoying things have been when I have had to do copy editing and not layout. About 50% of the changes requested once I had done the final layout were copy-editing. The worst one was the last where I was asked to put in a setting for an extract from a novel. Only the setting desperately needed copy-editing before in could be included. I particularly hated doing it as the writer is Russian and her normal prose has a Russian feel to it, that I think really enhances it. However this was long convoluted sentences that were written in different past tenses and was really quite difficult English to read. Now I could turn them into clearer English but that would be English-English and I might loose the Russian sound to the piece. It was a very difficult piece piece to copy edit and I am not really happy doing that. The changes that the printer wanted were just technical bits that I enjoyed the puzzle of sorting. Oh I also got to design the cover, and used a fractal from Apophysis Software. The printer asked what it means, the answer is that it does not mean anything except what the viewer sees. Fractals can be spectacularly beautiful or just chaotic.

Birthday was quiet on the whole. I failed this year to get the day off work, accidentally letting someone believe I was free on that date and thereby allowing them to create a meeting on that date. I did however have Friday off, although I was interviewing for my PhD on that date. On Friday I went to Breakfast (having done a Tescos shop on my computer first) then went onto Traidcraft to buy chocolates for the person I was interviewing.  However they weren’t open so I went up to Blackwells, not intending to buy, but then they had a book on Theological Anthropology and as that might be one description of my PhD I thought I better get it. Not that I had come across the term before but I am doing a PhD in theology that is decidedly anthropological in nature. Unfortunately I suspect the theological issues I will end up talking about will be significantly different to what the writer thinks they should be. For those who are interested while St Andrews Chesterfield was very concerned over communion, with Herringthorpe it is Baptism. If anyone had at the start of the PhD said I would have to have a chapter on the sacraments, I would have thought them crazy but it is increasingly looking as if I will. Anyway lunch time I went out to Roche Abbey taking a sandwich and a bottle of gingerbeer with me. I also took my camera with me and got some photos of the abbey and surroundings. Unfortunately I am still feeling my way with this camera (it was Olympus Mju not the Nikon DSLR) and I have not quite managed to get to doing everything right at the same time. So some are over exposed where I got it right on others and I managed to get my thumb slightly in on the one that I think has the best composition. If you are interested you can see the pictures on Flickr. In the evening I went out with the Dicksons to the Hui Wei> which is an interesting Chinese restaurant. They had a party with children in it and were slightly distracted with them, but the food was still good and slightly different from your normal English Chinese restaurant.

However the net result of that busy day was that I was whacked yesterday and as a result did not get things I was planning to do, done, so stayed at home this morning to finish off the essay.

This coming week is when everything starts up again so I have my writers group on Monday and Bible study on Tuesday at Herringthorpe. I will be interested to see if there is any change with who turns up as there no longer is a proper meal before hand. I actually suspect on the whole not. They are looking at Acts this time so we shall see how it goes. They seem to change the style of study pretty regularly. I have been to set book bible studies, I have been to talks by Nicky Gumble on video and I have been to themed bible studies and that in less than a year. Hopefully the rest of the week will be fairly quite. As there are more students around staff are getting back into teaching mode.

A quiet week after the bank holiday

Neil the tutor at my writers group had spoken of it taking a long time to do the layout of the booklet for my writers group. I presume this was because the way most people work it would indeed take a long time and drive me almost frantic. That is they decide how each bit of text should look individually and then alter it accordingly. I work with styles. I decide that there are a limited number of styles needed for a document and then I assign each piece of text to an appropriate style. If I therefore want to alter a style then I just edit the style. I do not have to search for every individual piece of text that I want like that and reformat it. I think I worked with Title, headings 1 to 3, two styles for Tables of contents,  a context style, a poetry style and a prose style. The only extra formatting was putting odd words into italic because they were either slang or foreign. It works, it is easy to deal with. Over fifty percent of the corrections have been editorial rather than layout. Technically not my brief, but I don’t really have the ability to go back to the copy-editor and say “is this change ok” and in the end the author actually does have the final say with this booklet. Admittedly the one piece that missed the copy-editor completely was by the copy editor.

Anyway by Monday I was just handling the occasional request for changes and so found that I had unexpectedly free time. So I finally got around to digging out the Drupal book and reading a couple of chapters. I am now at the stage of installation. Well before I go that far I need to order my new PhD computer and let it arrive so my old laptop can be turned into a linux laptop and used for running drupal on. I also need to change my old machine in work into a Linux one but that is not for web development but so I have a back up machine.

Tuesday I was into work. Actually having had a break I was trying to pick up where I had left things. This was not helped by the fact works email was down and I had looked at it on Friday to see what needed tackling and had a note that there was at least one appointment that needed making. In the end it was not up until Thursday and as Friday was my day off, the appointment could not be made until next week. However a book had come with the formula for the variance. It was therefore a very quiet day. However I spent the afternoon struggling with a piece of software so that it would draw the graphs I thought it should. It did in the end, but I have also discovered that I seem to have misplaced a piece of software I support. This would normally not be a problem but with my machine being reformatted I should re install it. Mind you I have the manuals and I have not had a query about it since I said I would support it.


Wednesday and Margo was in and we reviewed the sports paper with Richard and saw how he was handling it, also we looked at the Butyrate. I had just solved out how to get the graphs I wanted from the original package. I think I am going to do a graph per sheet although really they should be three graphs per page, or better still all six on a single page. I then went to get my hair cut during lunch. My hairdresser offers a tea coffee or water while we have our hair cut. I asked for black coffee. Unfortunately it tasted nothing like coffee normally does but like a weird mix of chemicals. That taste transition is for me the main precursor of a migraine, so I went to Boots and got some Migraleve, back into work, sorted thing out so I could go home and sleep it off. The result of the advance warning and therefore being able to take diversionary action was that it was lighter than most. I think technically I still was recovering on Thursday but I was certainly able to get up and cope with life.

Thursday I got the graphs drawn, spent some time sorting out the SAS licenses and generally had a fairly productive but normal day. Still got to contact a colleague about getting more memory in my old machine so I can change it to a linux machine. It really is too low spec to run modern Windows operating system effectively at work but as I don’t trust my present machine I do need a back up.

Friday was interesting in that I was in one of my very rare homemaker moods. So amongst things I made a ginger, carrot and sweet potato soup and also put on some whisky and ginger schnapps. For those of you with Scottish sensibilities the whiskey was firstly a blend and secondly Irish which just happened to be the cheapest blend in Waitrose at the time. I think I am rather pleased with this as it will mean that the schnapps will probably be smoother than it would have been otherwise. I also rang the doctors surgery opposite Herringthorpe URC to make an appointment with the manager as part of Herringthorpe URC needs assessment. Unfortunately having psyched myself up I rang just as he was leaving and did not get through but when I rang fifteen minutes later he had left. So I will have to ring on Monday.

Yesterday my parents came over. We ate the some of the soup with coconut cream in it. I sent them home with two boxes with the base in it as there was not space in my freezer. Dad brought over their new router from Zen. He wanted to know how to set it up. I hope it is largely setup and they can just set up things from the box and it will work. Slightly concerned that the routers wireless name begins with Thompson, I hope they have sent them the right one and there isn’t a Thompson household with a router that starts with Russell. On the other hand Mum spotted I was reading Pioneering the Third Age by Rob Merchant which I am not finding very satisfactory. She wanted to borrow it, however I managed to persuade her to take Valuing Age: Pastoral Ministry with Older People by James Woodward and Wesley Carr which I suspect and I think she does will be more in line with her interests. As I said to her it was not important that she remembers what is in there as she is not anymore active in the pastoral care of her congregation but if she wants to think through this as an older person it is one place to start. What I am trying to do is find ways of characterising the discourses around older people within congregations. This is somewhat harder than for children as often the older people are creating the discourses themselves.


As per usual we went shopping in town. Mum wanted a ball of wool as she thought she would run out with the jersey she is knitting herself, while their coffee grinder had stopped working. So we went to John Lewis’ that sell both of these items. Dad uses the coffee grinder most days, so it was well worth replacing. Dad in the end bought a burr coffee grinder, partly because the blade one was only a pound cheaper and a Bodum one. It was expensive as it had a chrome body, but what put me right off it, was its grind button was exactly the same design as the one on my grinder and my experience is that I have to be very careful I clean that properly or the grinder stops working. It is a fiddly bit of plastic and awkward to clean. I think the one he got will be stronger and therefore likely to last longer.