Preparing for Supervision during Holy week

I thought I would start this weeks blog off with something different so here is a picture. These are primroses that are at present in flower in Gell Street Park just close to my flat the picture was taken this morning on the way to church.

Monday seems a long way a way. The day was unremarkable, although I saw my boss at 11:30 which would have been the first time in about six weeks, other than passing in corridors or on the road, these two are infrequent as she works in a different building to me. We quite often buy each other coffee at these meetings, she started it. Oh the really good news is that actually I am now off being watched for the number of days off sick. I spent the evening with my writers group in The Frog and Parrot. The last time we were quite a crowd and it worked well despite the music. This time however when the music was turned up with their being fewer of us, it drowned the conversation somewhat. Neither myself or Neil the leader particularly like talking against background noise. However they did put on hits from the 1970s so at least quite a few in our group recognised the music.

Tuesday I was off work and writing, I managed to finish the essay about lunch time, but I agree as Ruth commented that it is a heavy essay. I suspect any of the three or so ideas in there could have done with a full essay on their own. It is part of thinking myself clear about the Reformed tradition and is basically my defence for putting up what I know to be a limited and personal account of that tradition. Basically I suspect that to do an authoritative account is such a major piece of work that it is beyond the scope of any doctoral student and probably would need to be a collaboration between a wide number of scholars from a variety of subjects and with differing perspectives. So not even one persons magnus opus. This is particularly true when you move outside the debates of theology.

Wednesday I was busy sorting out the exercise dataset. The previous set of results had given back an answer that was the wrong way around. As this particular result was maverick, it took me some time to track down what was going on. The answer seemed to be that it was not directly about quantity but when the carbohydrate was eaten on the day of the race.

Thursday was last day in work. Spent the morning discussing the data with the guy in charge of the exercise then finished the book; Resonate by Nancy Duarte . It is very good, it talks about giving presentations and before anyone thinks of it as about slides, one of her examples used is a sermon by a Presbyterian Minister John Ortberg. So forget slides, this is about communicating a message and putting in appropriate emotional content. I am going to try and apply some of it when I give my talk at Herringthorpe.

On the evening I went out to Maundy Thursday service at Herringthorpe. It was a communion service but the Methodist Minister decided to lead the first part with a presentation on the Jewish Seder. Not an actual seder but to present elements of the seder. What really surprised me was that Pauline had never been to such a service before. He also wanted to know who was the youngest. There was another woman there who has been coming to the church for about six months. Now I knew without a doubt that she was a good deal younger than me, but even Pauline would not accept that. So we had to go into declaring ages. I am thirteen years her elder. I am wondering how much this age thing has played into their perspective of me. As I was at in my mid thirties a lot of what they suggesting would have been a lot more appropriate, although i also acknowledge that the person I was in my thirties was even more highly strung than I am at present, but in my mid forties I am far more settled and formed in my own mind.

Friday was busy. Broomhall Breakfast had been rather struggling staff wise the previous week due to the Archer project closing on Friday, as it was closed again this week, I volunteered to be a general extra person around the place. I turned up just before 8:00 a.m. to find no Ollie and no Sarah (buses were running a Sunday service hence her late arrival). There were plenty of kitchen staff, five I counted including Mary. However I could not see any of them doing in front of counter jobs, so I took and served over thirty breakfasts between 8:00 am and 10:00 am. Then helped set up for the Good Friday service. Photocopying extra service sheets and setting up the projector. I stayed for the service as did about three other people from the Breakfast (not including Sarah and Sam who had to). This was rather than heading across to Herringthorpe to help hand out hot cross buns with serviettes and cards which explain about Easter. I went to bed and slept for an hour or so, then got up and got the papers ready to send to my supervisor.

Yesterday was quieter. I shopped in the morning and then tried to copy CDs of interviews I have done so I could send them to people. However the drive was faulty and when I went out there was a black cloud and thunder rolling around. So I went in, switched off my computers and got my coat. Then went into town to get a drive. On the way back it came down pretty heavily. At one stage I took shelter under some bushes hoping it would go over. This was a mistake as it then took to hailing and the stones were the size of sugar cubes and stung when they hit me. I don’t think I have any bruises but I have not checked.

Today I went to the morning service at Herringthorpe. Pauline has developed a tradition of throwing what I suspect was originally cream eggs but this year was just bars in chocolate, into the congregation. However she wanted to make sure the children had them first so they had to come out and collect theirs although she gave Henry (96) one as well. It is funny as it loosens the congregation up a lot and generally gives a good shuffle space. I think that the blessing of water the Orthodox way may have a similar effect if they are liberal with the sprinkling of water. I guess it is something like when a congregation laughs wholeheartedly.

On the way back I unfortunately hit the curb at quite a pace and ended up with a flat tyre. I pulled in at a bus layby not thinking to pull in on the side road to check. I then went to ring the car company on my mobile only for that to be dead, I think my mp3 player also discharged at that point, which all seems somewhat odd. So I had no choice but to go looking for a phone. Unfortunately there was no a public phone at the shops just up the road, but I saw a man clipping his hedge. He lent me his mobile and then when it was clear that the company was going to take a while to get someone out, he offered to change the tyre and I accepted. Unfortunately I was unable to ring back to tell them from his phone. However at that point my brain had calmed down enough to realise that it might be a connection that was causing my phone to blank. I took out the battery and jiggled around the sim and memory card and then put back in the battern and suddenly it was working again.

From Moderator's prayers to Salsa Classes

So what has happened this week. Well Monday was quiet I think. I know I was busy in work but apart from shopping and such I can’t remember anything major happening. On Tuesday I finished the backlog at work and saw a PhD student who is the sort who seems to suspect statistics are very delicate electrical circuits and if you don’t treat them just right they are liable to give you an electric shock. She first presented the data as two t-tests. However on typing in the second set of data I spotted one group was identical to the previous study. So I went and redid the analysis using oneway ANOVA. Then spent fifteen to twenty minutes repeating again and again the same information on how to read the output. I also suspect I signed up for Linkedin, now I must admit at some stage I really should do this, but at the present the real reason was just to see an article. Unfortunately the sign up seems to involve providing contacts and the time I wanted to spend on it was not that much. I tried to remove from the list it found the obvious distant contacts but thinking through it at the time was beyond me. I will sort it at sometime and some stage just not at present.

However that evening I went to a prayer meeting called by Kevin Watson. Well it was one of those times when someone decides to ask relevant questions for my research and all I have to do is sit back and listen. He wanted to know what had been happening and what was God doing at Herringthorpe. Great questions from my perspective and it was worth listening just to hear what people thought God was doing at Herringthorpe. Yes they came out with the story that I was familiar with, but they could have come out with other stories, there was also one cryptic comment by a church secretary who commented that God is changing Herringthorpe’s attitudes. Well the result was I came back and wrote up immediately.

The price came the next day when I had a migraine. Actually it was strange in that I did not wake with it, but as soon as I got to breakfast I started feeling very tired. So decided to see if an hour back in bed would clear it, only for me to realise as I got into bed there was a headache and other migraine symptoms as well, so I got up, rang into work and then crashed for four hours.

However was back in work on Thursday and trying to catch up on time missed on Wednesday. I had a data set that had been problematic. I thought I knew what was wrong but it was going to be a lot of work. I tried it and it did not work. So I sat back and suddenly the obvious popped into my brain. What people had eaten for breakfast might just effect the results of their pre-race test! and that would cause problems when dealing with the post race test and altering for pre-race performance. It worked and I finished the report and got ready for a meeting with my boss on Monday.

Friday was supposedly a write day, but at least the first part was interrupted . I turned up to breakfast to find not only had some of the food not made it, but they were short staffed and the Archer Project had decided to shut without telling us. So I did breakfast duty for a while on an ad hoc basis i.e. I was both sides of the counter doing what was required. I therefore went about 8:30 and got back about 10:15. I had also picked up Philip Benedicts book “Christ’s Churches: Purely Reformed - A Social History of Calvinism” and I realised not only was the last section on “New Calvinist Men and Women?” which picks up Max Weber’s contention that Reformed Christianity brought in a new “psychological” understanding of what it meant to be a person and explores the historical evidence for this. His results would not be conclusive for two reasons., Firstly the he would not want his carefully nuanced academic tome to be read either as simply full agreement or disagreement rather as interesting hints and such. Secondly the data is largely external data such as the percentage of illegitimate children born during that time. It is quite a big jump to go from practical workings out to internal understandings. However Philip Benedict is also a good writer and I found the work intriguing. Needless to say I spent the rest of the morning reading that. The result was I only got around to writing in the afternoon and in the evening Herringthorpe ladies were having a Salsa night. The lady teaching was good and she made it simple enough that we managed a form of Salsa dancing. I had not realised you needed shoes that could slip. It was good fun. It sounds as if a group of the ladies enjoyed it so much that they will be going to her regular class on a Monday night. Unfortunately that clashes directly with writers so is not on for me.

Saturday I spent writing. Unfortunately I have not finished the essay yet. It is going to be a long one and I think it is important enough to write the extra. There seems to be some hidden rule of writing that the more time available the more time it takes to write.

Today I went to Herringthorpe for the Palm Sunday service. Junior church is definitely down on normal weeks although the creche was up due to grandchildren. This year they sort of managed a procession (last year if I recall the crosses were given out at the end of the service as Pauline had forgotten to do them). Evening service was cancelled due to the fact that two families would be away so I have only had to do the church heating this afternoon.

Teaching week with some research reading time

Right this last week has been busy. This is always the case when I have a teaching week. The nice thing was that due to the way I had paced myself the week before and the fact that I had spent quite some time checking that things were sorted before hand.

Monday was relatively quiet, in that the morning was fairly routine although I ended up showing a person NVivo. I have found that when I start showing people what that computer program does, particularly those on the more literary-qualitative based research they are delighted. I am then honest with them and say that such programs come at a cost and the cost here is not the software but the hardware that you need. I am for instance using the software for my Reformed Spirituality part of my thesis and am linking it to the relevant books on Google or elsewhere but also quoting bits and coding the bits I am quoting. Thus I hope that I will have the ability to produce quite a nuaunced explanation of what is actually going on. By the way can anyone give me a brief explanation of how piety differs from spirituality? This is a very light way of doing this. There was no writers group in the evening.

Tuesday was the first of the taught courses. I was in work finishing off slides. This time I have taken responsibility for updating the course material. This is not hard work as it is not like many courses where it would mean I had to keep up with the latest reading. Rather all that it means is that I have to check that the latest software runs as I said it did two years ago. This is easy because I actually open the software and use it practically every day. The other thing that has changed is that responsibility for looking after the room and making sure it is ready for courses has been given to one person. This meant that I was able to ask for a check of things and to make sure things were working before I went up. So the course went well and I even had the energy to go to Bible Study afterwards although it was obvious during that that I was tired.

Wednesday was a sunny day, indeed it has remained sunny right up to today. The afternoon I spent on a study of cognitive performance by participants in a race. It was interesting. I have sat down and I think there is probably something there, but it is tricky to get it out. The main problem being that it is a relatively small data set and therefore many things are strongly correlated.

Thursday was the second course day, in someways simpler, but wish I would remember to get in as early as I did on the first. Admittedly I got distracted at lunch time. I pointed out on Ship of Fools that discernment of the Word of God is communal in Reformed theology and somebody wanted me to back up my assertion. Well I have gained much of my understanding by talking with people who are Reformed rather than from reading the texts. So I had a moment of doubt. However that evening I had assembled in less than an hour a number of statement that clearly indicated that an individual on their own was not sufficient an interpreter of the Word. These included quotes directly from Calvin’s Institutes (his section on the Church as our mother is useful) and the Westminster Confession. I could have looked further and I undoubtedly would have found more. I of course know that they placed centrally the teaching role of the cleric within the congregation but still it is interesting to see how easy it was.

Friday and Saturday were research days. I got through quite a bit of reading despite the ease with which I get distracted. I managed to read the crucial chapter in Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. I am not interested in his economic argument but about how he discerned or understood the “Protestant Ethic”. It is interesting, partly because he does focus on what I think is going to be my argument about what Reformed Spirituality actually is. However I suspect he made a mistake and chose to focus on the English speaking Reformed tradition with particular relationship to America. That he is not well read in this shows at times, he quotes the Savoy Declaration and not about church government. He also quotes the Westminster Confession. They are both Reformed documents but you don’t normally quote from both if you have read them thoroughly. The Savoy Declaration is for large parts lifted verbatim from the Westminster Confession. He also wants to hang everything on predestinarianism, I suspect in this case if I have to hang it on one of the pegs of TULIP I would hang it on Perseverance of the Saints (intriguingly in the TULIP summary of the Synod of Dort there is no P for Predestinarianism). The haunting question is “How do you know if you are saved?”. I also finished Howard L Rice’s book on Reformed Spirituality and reviewed it on Amazon. Next books up are “Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed” by Philip Benedict, Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” and Jonathon Edwards “The Religious Affections”. Ideally all should be read by next weekend, this will not happen.

Friday night I went to the Dickson’s for a really pleasant meal.They were just back from Norfolk on one of Margaret Fall’s trips. Their major grumble was that they spent too much time on the bus getting brief limited glimpses of many things when they would have preferred to have seen fewer places but had longer to explore them. It was also nice to get there in the light. I got asked about when I was coming back and they were surprised to find out that it is as soon as October.

Today Herringthorpe had the Watoto Children’s Choir  and you can hear snippets of them. They are lively and explosive in their performance. I turned up at 10:10 and the car park was already full, people who are late to such services are going to struggle to find parking! I better start checking out the side roads and yes I think the congregation size has grown over the time I have been there. I also got my parking permit for the church and it is now in my bag in case I need it. It only functions for one car unfortunately so here is hoping that if I need to go during the day that that car is available. I must admit I came away early, I had enjoyed myself but I had also over done it.

Rather a pleasant Saturday in the midst of a normal week

This has been a relatively quiet week. Monday I can’t remember anything in particular happening. I know I was in work and spent quite a bit of time sorting out the room for a course I am going to teach next week, I also started the process of updating the booklet for the course, and dealt with a number of other little bits and pieces. I went shopping at Waitrose and they have back in Twinnings Jasmine Earl Grey which is delicious black. The other thing is they have Saffron Cakes in. Now Marks and Sparks definitely take the cup for best Hot Cross Buns with their Cranberry and orange ones. Alright way way back in the mists of time Safeway and then Waitrose did an apricot version that was even nicer but I have not seen that for years. However saffron cakes are delicious too and well worth buying. They are slightly cakier than Hot Cross Buns but not much and they have a yellow colour to them.

Tuesday was an interview day. I suspect people think an interview takes just two hours, well you need to add that: the preparation time (about an hour), the travelling (usually over an hour) the writing up, two to three hours and the basic management. What looks like 2 hours work is at least seven hours work. It of course would help if I could just sit down and write it up, but my brain does not work like that. Then I am leading evening worship this evening and I wanted to do some preparation for that. By the time I was finished I had got Tuesday and Wednesday pretty full with just doing one interview and other bits and pieces. I also decided I needed to get the backup sorted for my computers and therefore ordered a 1TB network drive. This stores an incremental back up of my main machine and does a regular back up of my laptop once a week. The reason for the different approaches is that my laptop travels while my main machine doesn’t.

Thursday I was back in work, you may remember that during the summer I was doing some work on fibre, well teaching has slowed the work down as well as other research projects but this week it came up again. I spent two hours with another academic trying to finalise the paper. I expect it will take at least another hour on Monday and probably more. Its there but not quite and the not quite is about getting the detail right. I also was sorting out other bits and pieces.

Friday equally was a busy day, I basically needed to get the course notes up to date and in working form. I went to collect a prescription from the chemist, only it was still muddled and they had only the stuff I had not taken two months ago. The resulted in me getting an emergency prescription and them having to sort it out next week. I did not tell them that actually I could manage, simply because I have some extra left over from when I was cutting back on the prescription. However as I sometimes up my dose (with doctors permission) I like to keep that in reserve. In other words I am slowly using that supply up. The backup drive had come and I tried to set it up but about 8:00 p.m. it decided to disappear off the network.  Sort of got it up again, but wasn’t  really successful.

Saturday and still no luck with the drive, or none before I needed to get out to go to a Stationers to do some photocopying for me before going to a talk as part of the poetry festival.So I left it and headed out. What should have been a simple task at the stationers took longer than expected, and I ended up running down the hill to the Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery,  which is in the Furnival Building on Sheffield Hallam University’s central campus. There was a talk on the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas in the early months of the First World War. Robert Frost was in England trying to get his poetry published and Edward Thomas was a literary critic at the time. Thomas seemed to grasp Frost’s intention as a poet as well as anyone at the time, and this formed the basis of their friendship. The central bit is actually about Frost’s poem  “The Road Not Taken”  which seems to have been based on shared experiences in Gloucestershire and also seems to have been key to Thomas’ decision to enlist. I am used to the more ironic reading of that poem, may even have got half way there myself, but I had always thought the woods American and to find them British is a surprise.  I then went with other members of my writers group who were also at the lecture to the Fusion Cafe  which had a delicious Moroccan lamb pasty and salad. There was plenty of vegetarian food (maybe the majority) but it all seemed to have cheese in it. I certainly think it is worth another visit.  I then went onto town to shop for food and found Practical Photography magazine in WH Smiths. I also got some nice shower gel as a treat. Then walked up home. As I got to West Street I could hear this drum beat and as I got by Zizzi’s it became louder so I stopped and a group of Morrismen came walking through.

When I got home I found the backup  drive seemed to have fixed itself!!! I have never really known that happen before! Modern computers are getting simpler to use. There would have been a time when I would have had to set up the network to look for the drive and so on. This time not only did it install straight forwardly but when something appeared to have gone wrong it actually sorted it out. I suspect an update of firmware happening at an inopportune moment for me. Stuart came around in the evening to discuss the week with me and brought another bottle of Ame. He is quite surprised at how much he is saving now that he is not drinking. Then later when Stuart had gone home I heard the blast of a car horns and a car came past waving the Indian flag, slightly later there was a another drum and this time another group of Indian cricket fans came marching past.

Today I have been to Herringthorpe twice. This morning was communion but Pauline I think was making a point, we had a wide variety of new hymns from no less than four hymnbooks: Songs of Fellowship, BBC, Mission Praise and Rejoice and Sing. None of them were repetitive a complaint against the songs chosen last week. That did not mean we were familiar with all of them, well I was but not many of the others. This evening I was leading, now leading for evening worship is not the same as taking a service. What it meant I did was that I chose a song or hymn and prepared to lead the discussion and keep and eye on the time. Well I started something the last time because I brought chocolates, we now don’t meet without food. This time I was not the provider but Dorothy brought a meringue with thick creamy filling and an orange (marmalade) flavoured source. I had taken my lactase tablets and I think I got away with eating a slice. Oh choosing the hymn was interesting. The theme was basically taken from Matthew 6: 1-24, but was called secrecy so emphasising verse 4. Hymns on that theme are few and far between. I found one eventually which was to a well known tune Ashgate.