Reporting back on the festive season

Lets see how I can do for a brief roundup. I left Christmas too late really or the snows just made everything that much more difficult. The fact that for two to three weeks I could not get to Herringthorpe meant that when I could I felt I should go there. This meant going to both the Cristingle and the Carol Service. That at least one week meant two services. The upshot of it was that I called off going to the works party. That did not mean an extra day off work but that I did not have the hassle of trying to organise myself to be on form for it. I am really getting to the stage where I feel that there is little point in my attending although I do still try to go for good form sake. I honestly would prefer to be managing the reception desk for the whole day than at the party.

The next day it was pack up and go to my parents. I aimed to be there about 6pm, but it was nearer to 7pm when I actually arrived. No the journey from Sheffield does not take long but I had so much to do. Not just collecting the car but buying too really big plastic boxes to put stuff in. I was so intent on buying the boxes I did not spot that they were on “buy one get one half price” which was nice. I have now found a place to store them in my flat. Hopefully both of them will only be needed at Christmas and I can get away with only one mid year.

The reason for the late arrival was my inability to get past Chesterfield, this despite having spent two years negotiating the back routes for my PhD. I guess I was cocky and I failed miserably until I just decided to follow the signs from Hathersage and stop being clever. No gritters this year although the car was less powerful than last (it was also smaller which in my opinion is a good thing) and I was not turning down the gears quick enough but there was little other traffic on the road.

The next day was quiet although I made the Christmas Pudding, however I spotted when I started cooking that the quantity of the packs of “150g pack Waitrose Soft Tropical Fruit Medley, roughly chopped” were not what I had bought but 220g pack. That’s odd I thought, then realised the stuff I was dealing with looked almost glace in texture. Brain starts thinking “They are treating this stuff differently to what they used to I really want the other stuff”. So I put in a full bag, as I am pretty sure that you get less genuine fruit per gram, but the fruit had poor flavour. Next year if I repeat the recipe I think I am going to have to buy other soft dried fruit and make the mix for myself.

The day started quietly, Dad decided that church was out as the streets were too icy to walk and car moving was not appropriate. However to get up to Cathy’s we would go in his car. That meant all sorts of fancy maneuvers as Dad would not countenance me parking in the slot of someone who appeared to be away on the day. Instead of which the position I parked in may have caused a neighbour to have difficulty in getting out but appeared to be the only other option.

Cathy had this year decided that Christmas should be lower key and that she was not going to fuss so much. The result was an overall much pleasanter Christmas meal. My MP3 player that has all the Christmas music on it decided to stop working. I don’t know if plugging it into a computer might bring it to life or if I just need to get on with it and buy a new mp3 player and speakers for next year. As usual we ran Irene home.

On the Monday I made a whiskey and ginger cake to this recipe, the thing is that you can either make that a mild ginger recipe by using fairly mild ginger or a strong ginger recipe by using strong ginger. Needless to say as it is me, I made the strong form. I also went shopping around Heatons. Not much was open but the Somerfield at Moor Top has been taken over by Co-op and this seems to have improved it. It was not bad before but the stuff was better displayed and more the range I am interested in. It also was distinctly different from the Tesco Metro just up the road at which I bought nothing.

On the Tuesday I was up to Drummore. The run was straight forward, and I went the south way around Manchester. I think now they have sorted the traffic problems around the Trafford Centre it is probably the better way to go. This time I missed the Old School House for Lunch and therefore had to continue onto Newton Stewart. I decided I might as well see what was open there and found that Cinnamon a local Christian cafe, book shop and grockle outlet, was open and selling home made soup. I’d prefer to shop there for Christian books than the local branch of CLC which is the best Sheffield now has on offer.

The big news from Drummore is the former Ship Inn is now a Thai Restaurant. This is really quite a daring experiment. Posh pub food (also served at the Ship Inn) is about as exotic as Drummore has previously got. The locals seem to be willing to give it a try but we did not over the holiday time.

The rest of the time passed fairly quietly, in part because I had to do a lot of reading for my PhD. I am trying to collate the ideas I have had over the last four and a half years and see if I can find a pattern/ range of themes or such that could be sorted into a thesis. It is not lack of ideas, plenty of them, as those who have read the papers I have written will know but it is actually trying to develop a rope out of all the different strands.

Also while I was there Erin from Ship of Fools died. The first inkling I got of this was actually on 2nd December. Morag had taken the two girls to the Quaker Meeting in Newton Stewart, and they had done Sadako, who tried to fold 1000 paper cranes, as part of her cure for Leukaemia caused by the bombing on Hiroshima. She folded 663 before she died. Folding the cranes became her way of fighting the disease. Cait wanted to hear the story. Now it is a sad story and I knew when she asked me to read it, that I did not want to. Nothing I could put my finger on so I read, and was in tears for the later part of the story. I presumed some displaced grief was being released and thought nothing more of it. The next morning on browsing the Ship of Fools forum I spotted a “Important -Please Read thread in Styx” apparently started by Erin. My initial response was “Drat what an awful time for them to decide to take the ship into dry dock”, but I clicked on it, only to find it was actually posted by her brother Jason as Erin had died on 30th December. From the sound of things it was pretty quick, Erin showing ‘flu like symptoms earlier in the day, before being rushed to hospital and dying on admittance. She was only 39.

Now Erin isn’t someone I would claim as a friend, she is someone I respected highly, but I did not personally interact with her. I am trying to sort that out, because people talk on the Ship of being scared of her. I think I can say that with me it was not so simple. I never felt the need to post things that drew her ire, I rather listened and learned about what was and what was not acceptable on the site. However I don’t think I ever did not post something because I felt it would annoy Erin. I usually did not post something because I felt that either others had said it better or that what I had written was rubbish. However she was deeply connected with the boards. In the early days she helped “save” the boards when under attack from an internet troll who had scuttled other boards. She developed ways of coping with trolls and other storms that effect all internet forum firstly on the fee paying boards and finally on the public boards. These methods largely work, ship-of-fools is neither a lovey-dovey strongly controlled coterie nor a boards continually caught up in cataclysmic wars. Through a range of methods including having ten fairly straight forward rules, having a place to take personal attacks and also a board dedicated to issues that people tend to talk past each other on, she helped create a place where discussion can happen. Some of these are taken up more widely. If a discussion board has clear published rules they often owe quite a bit of what is in them to Ship-of-Fools. Others are hotly debated, the Hell board for containing personal vindictiveness, is effective but many people seem to get confused by it. The instruction to “take it to Hell or shut up” seems to work better than the instruction just to “shut up”. Linguistically the places is rougher, but it is a bit like having something out with someone in front of a school forum where others can comment. It sorts the trolls from the merely inexperienced who want to learn.

Ship of Fools is also a community that knows it grieves well. That is it can handle grief and perform well during times of grief. This goes back to 2002 when Miss Molly died, if you doubt this read this . If you have the time, spend more time in Limbo and read the other threads to Gambit and Kenwritez. However it is a strange time, Erin was bigger than anyone else on the boards. She was present even when she wasn’t in the way people related and it is a complete surprise. I am not sure even yet that everyone knows who should.

I travelled back last Thursday, Mum and Dad were surprised to see me back around 4pm, but if I leave at around 10:00 a.m. then the journey between Stockport and Drummore takes until around 4pm usually. Gritters were out but again clear roads. Then on Friday came back to Sheffield via Fleur and Walters. They were kind enough to provide me with lunch which I appreciated, however Erin’s funeral was at 4pm GMT and although I was not going I hoped to be in the Ship-of-Fools cafe for the time, so I could not stop.

Yesterday was spent sorting things out, then installing software so I could access the work I have done over the holidays on PhD from my main home computer and then Stuart came around to catch up.

Today I attended Herringthorpe and so am back into life in Sheffield. I have a busy day tomorrow and probably won’t go back into work until Wednesday (taking an extra days holiday so I can finish what I need to write for this months supervision).