A week in due to a cold

There isn’t much news this week due to the cold. Normally if I get a cold and I can spend the first day in and bombing it, that is the last I hear of it. Not the case with this one. Having spent last weekend in I was hoping to go into work on Monday only for it to boil out over night. So cancelled Monday’s meetings in the hope that I would be better for Tuesday as I was teaching.

I did do the teaching on Tuesday but even with fairly strong suppressants I was far from well and thoroughly exhausted by Tuesday evening. I knew that even if the cold would miraculously get better overnight I would still have been exhausted on Wednesday. However the symptoms started to ease Wednesday afternoon although I still tire easily but I am not coughing and spluttering all over the places as I was earlier on.

The up side of this was that I have got a lot of reading done. Not only did I manage to finish David Cornick’s book “Letting God be God” but also “Living the Christian Life” by Robert Ramey and Ben Campbell Johnson. The second book, if anyone is considering doing a membership refresher course might well be worth considering as it looks at different aspect of Reformed community life although it is based in PCUSA rather than the UK, also I have read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (the Guardian has a decent review. However speaking as someone from a URC perspective, Robinson must be an acute observer. She gets things right in ways that had be laughing with recognition. That says something. Is it accidental that John Ames good friend is Boughton the Presbyterian Minister in the town or that they tend to agree at least on matters of theology? I am now about half way through Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor. It is a fuller edition rather than the shorter one many have read. I think next will actually be “Working the Angles” by Eugene Peterson for a modern view on pastoral care (he was minister at a Presbyterian Church for thirty years).

Yesterday Mum and Dad came over for the morning. This time the request was not to go into town but to go and shop in Waitrose. There appear to be a few things that mum and dad have difficulty getting locally that they can get from Waitrose but they failed to get decaff coffee beans. If I had been up to it, I would have tried to persuade them to go into town to Pollards the specialist coffee shop and to see if they had the beans but after lunch I was very tired, I presume due to the cold so sent them home and went and slept myself.

Today I went to Herringthorpe in the morning. It was the Sunday after Holiday Bible Club, but please don’t think of the chaos that used to be around them at Parrswood. Here as it is holiday there were a few children with grandparents who aren’t there usually but junior church is reduced as quite a few are taking the last weekend away after helping at Holiday Bible Club. There also was a lady talking about the Christian Bookshop that has been set up in Rotherham. However please don’t get any hopes up, this is a small venture and definitely evangelical in bias. It really takes some skill to have a bookstall with nothing I want to buy on it.

A positive whirlwind of a week

Right lets see, this week has been eventful but largely pleasant. Monday the big thing was that I was in work. That may seem odd but if I am going to get a migraine then the usual time is shortly after time of the month, for this month I worked out that that was the last possible date for it to happen.

Also over the weekend I posted the following blog post  in response to something on Facebook. It was one of those occasions when I felt compelled to respond to something due to who I was in contact with on Facebook. I function so often as if I don’t have mental health distress, that I suspect that people hearing about it, may consider me lying. I certainly in my public behaviour don’t fit the stereotypes and as my health has been improving recently I do so less and less. This as a rule makes me less and less willing to talk about it. The last thing I want people to think is that because I can cope with what I can cope with that other people with mental health distress should as well. However it comes differently when someone is feeling isolated due to mental health problems. It is however always nerve wracking when you reveal something like this and I wondered what would be the outcome. However that piece did all I wanted it to do.

In work this last week I have been working to do the final analysis of Butyrate paper so that it could be put into a presubmission draft. Hopefully by the end of this week the main author will have got it into a form where it can be submitted.

On Thursday I went down to Birmingham for a supervision for my PhD. My supervisor moved it forward to 12:30p.m. as he wanted to get home to be with the dogs as his partner was away or that was partially a front. I suspect that with last times supervision being rushed due to management issues at the University he decide that this was not going to be a single hour supervision. It is one of the very few times I have ever had claustrophobia at the end of a supervision, but as that is my usual response to when big things happen. The supervision resulted in a major realignment of my doctorate, the reasons for this is good, it plays to my strengths in thinking theoretical, it builds on  a long term sociological debate in a positive way. Sociology for a long while has been divided between those who are big theorists who see everything as determined by society; on the other hand are those who see everything as determined by the freedom of the individual. My study now becomes a look at the way a particular grand narrative (Reformed tradition) is played out within two specific instances(congregations) and I suspect to show both form and variability, or if you prefer a renegotiation of the Reformed tradition in two different locations. The snag is of course although I am thoroughly Reformed, much of my knowledge of the tradition is tacit, this is not surprising, much of the tradition is spread tacitly. However I need to turn it into explicit knowledge. What is more as the part of the tradition I am interested in is the pragmatic part rather than the doctrinal, it is perhaps better to refer to this as Reformed Spirituality rather than doctrine. Snag, Reformed tradition is activist as such has a suspicion of spirituality which is often associated with more meditative/contemplative traditions. So it is not pick up half a dozen books and read, but a careful working through of Reformed classic, descriptive portrayals (both fictional and factual), reading prayers and sermons by particular leaders asking all the time “What does it say here about being Reformed?”

Friday I went to the woman’s night at Herringthorpe. It was a Wii night which nearly always embarrasses me as somewhere in the last twenty years I seem to have picked up some coordination that I lacked when younger, or other people have drastically lost theirs because I actually seem to do above average on them. A third possibility is the Wii was designed by geeks who set it for geek level coordination and everyone else is too coordinated.

Last two days have had a cough with a sore throat, which has kept me in, partly in an attempt not to spread it but also so as to keep the infection as short as possible. It may at last be on the withdrawal stage as I seem to be coughing less and I don’t think my throat is as sore. Surprisingly when compared with recent colds it has not landed me in bed for most of the day as well as the night. So I have been using it to get on the reading on the Reformed tradition. So far I have read “Letting God be God” by David Cornick and am reading “Living the Christian Life: A Guide to Reformed Spirituality” by Robert H Ramey Jr and Ben Campbell Johnson and “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson which is supposedly a letter written by an elderly Congregational minister in 1957 to his young son which tells his life story.

Normal weeks for the start of February

I think this will be thematic rather organised by date. The really good news is that I have sorted my diary, it now seems to be functioning properly or it is doing until the University moves its diary system over to Google Apps. Mind you I came down on Friday evening to find two of the directors larking about with advertising merchandise from Google. I hope things stay sensible. Anyway as long as I sync’ my contacts at the same time and don’t try sync’ing two diaries at the same time it usually does not get into a huff.

I think I am settled down to the normal routine in work, it is funny but getting back and getting into my stride always takes longer than I expect.  Most of my work at present is concentrating on getting the Butyrate paper ready for publication. I am not writing it but I am responsible for the graphs. I hope it comes out. Our conclusion is that the accepted norm is not proven. Indeed even to get the consistency we produce is dubious.The studies are not really comparable and their conclusions don’t agree. What we want to achieve apart from getting the paper published is for a set of more definitive experiments to be funded.

However due to a cold and then an interview for my thesis I then was not in work for very long that week. The interview was with a couple, both on their second marriage as their had both been widowed, who lived out at Maltby. He was a dyed in the wool congregationalist. As strong in that approach as any Presbyterian at St Andrews, while she was Anglican choir in background but had settled in Herringthorpe when her children were small as the local Anglican church had nothing for them. She was not the sort of person to sit on the side lines and was singing in Herringthorpe’s choir within a month.

Last weekend not only was i writing a paper for my next supervision (on small groups at Herringthorpe) but Stuart was giving me and Sarah and anyone who wanted it a tour of Western Park Museum. He was concentrating on the way that paintings are used among the displays to help people visualise what Sheffield was once like. However there was also a new exhibition called Sports Lab. Now normally I think this would largely be of interest to boys but this one included a dance game which I could see any dance minded girl enjoying. They had babies on it while we were there and they really did not get it. However I suspect a primary age girl with some dancing ability could get a really good display.

Sunday I was hoping to get to Herringthorpe for morning worship, church meeting and evening worship, In the end I only made evening worship, which rather conveniently was on not hurrying. Nor did I do any work on my paper but by then it was already clear I would have enough to write. Sunday evening services are bible study as worship. A fairly low key event provided you have a group who are willing to share the leadership and several musicians who will take it in turns to play.

Monday went to writers group and got a surprisingly positive response to the poem I took. Normally there are suggestions for improvement, but this time they seemed happy for it to stay as it was. Even asked whether I had intentionally based it around a sonnet form. No, I really should check what sonnet form is, it just was the form that was natural for that piece.

Wednesday was busy with both a research computing group and a post grad open day. I am afraid most people looking for postgraduate study assuming that IT is irrelevant to their application. Admittedly I did when doing my for Birmingham but then I expected and indeed use the systems at Sheffield. That however brought up a snag the one time in the year where we do get to give post graduates information is an afternoon at the start of term in late September or early October (last year 28th September, looks like 27th September this year ). I need to be around for that.

Thursday started collating the papers for my supervision together and sent them off on Friday having revised my essay. Last time there were relatively few; this time there were lots. That does not mean that last time there was little to talk about and this time lots, just that this time the topics to discuss are bitty so rather than having one big thing to discuss we have lots of little bits. Oh well I will have jumped through another hoop towards the PhD, basically this time give progress report. Did you know there is twice as much form filling associated with a part time PhD as there is with a full one. Someone needs to do something about it, the idea that part timers have that sort of extra time is ridiculous. When they allow up to update records online instead for these procedures then we will be onto a much better system. Oh and it is not necessary for me to review training and check progress separately.

Saturday was a day off, I did go into town, bought an audio extension lead a magazine and some food, then tried to make copies of recordings of interviews  onto CDs. I found out why I have not been doing this as I needed the software to do it. So I bought the software only for two of the remaining three CDs to develop faults. So I have had to order more CDs.

Today Herringthorpe in the morning and then an unwind and relax the rest of the day. I will try and write an account of this morning in church but then to bed.