Right I think this will have to be a highlights writing again as life has been busy and I don’t think you want to read a book about what has been going on. Early part of the week before last was a mix between busy and down with a migraine catching me out on the Tuesday and have SRDS which is the annual personal performance review on the Wednesday.
Then on the Thursday it was off to Birmingham for a supervision. It was useful in a number of ways. Firstly even though I have not finished my placement I am now writing for my thesis. The writing before has been exploratory on the whole and I have tended to have based it around essay/article approach. This gives a very intense and immediate focus to what I write, however when I write for my thesis, the pieces are less focused. I am often putting a marker to say here is something that either needs to go elsewhere or will be written about elsewhere. I suspect if I get to writing a Reformed piety it will be rather different to other people’s yet people will recognise it as delineating the area. The reason being is that most people seem to describe as elements that must be there for it to be Reformed, I tend rather to see it as a sets of tensions and forces that have to be negotiated. The form is rarely totally dominated by a single group of thought and different strands include different elements. What makes them Reformed is that the negotiation takes place.
Friday was the breakfast and there were forty six meals served. I was whacked by the end of it but also was officially in work. At one stage Sarah and I had to set up another table so people coming in had somewhere to sit. It seems as if it is more popular in the summer when it is pleasant to get up and go outside but we are not sure. There also has been some grumbling about the Archer project.
Saturday Mum and Dad came over. Shopping list was as follows:
Decaf coffee, fruit, veg, soya dream all from Waitrose
Shoes, black flat with a high buckle strap for Mum
Mobile phone for Dad as his old one was switching on but not maintaining a connection. As you'd guess we spent quite a while going around the shops. Fortunately everything we wanted seemed to come fairly readily to had. O2 does a really cheap phone that has fairly clear buttons which Dad was happy with, Jones had a sale on where a pair of Ecco shoes in just the design mum wanted in her size were available. This was good as the combination is not usually very common in summer. We then made the mistake of going to Marks and Spencers for a drink. I forgot that the cafe is now on the second floor. This is not a good combination with my parents as there is no down escalator from the second to the first floor so with Dad finding going down steps more difficult these days I have to persuade him to use the lift.
Sunday was a very busy thesis day. Not only was their worship on the morning followed by church meeting but there was also Baptisms at 6pm followed by socialising. The people getting baptised were all church youth, who had been brought up in the faith. As part of the service they had the poem GodGazer which the two girls had found very meaningful. I found it difficult to connect with and I am wondering why. It is a polemical poem, my work is mainly descriptive and I felt at times that the polemic was allowed to break the poetic voice too readily or used as a “get out of jail free” card when he really should have worked harder at what his was doing. I don’t object to breaking the voice particularly the rhythm but you need to be doing it for a purpose and less is more. That said, I would also say two of the readers were under rehearsed and that that made it harder to appreciate. A performance by the author is also on the web Oddly enough though not directly inspired by this I think the next poem I take to writers group will be more polemical. There is stuff boiling around as well. Anyway the church was packed, about 50% from Herringthorpe and 50% friends and relatives, some coming quite a distance. The moderator Kevin Watson preached and there was a band, partly from musicians in the church and partly from friends who had come in. There were traditional hymns at the start and the finish but officially set to new tunes. Amazing grace at the start was at least in part, one of the verses was used as a chorus and was definitely sung to a new tune however I am not sure of the rest of the verses. The other one was Lord of all Hopefulness, which as far as I can tell was same tune but different accompaniment! However at long last I have seen evidence that my suspicion that there is new music I don’t know is correct. All the songs chosen by the young people to be sung after their baptism were new to me. At about 8:00 pm when the church was emptying I went home, the congregation went around to one of the parents/grandparents home and carried on partying until the wee hours of the morning. Facebook can be quite useful for fieldwork sometimes.
Officially this has been a quiet week. It certainly does not feel like it. During it I have been tackling a dataset for a student doing her masters in Human Nutrition. The problem was the sheer quantity of data and getting it into a form where she could hope to write a paper from it. The problem is that the data is electronically recorded and therefore it is easy to collect but the tendency is too collect too much.
I have also come across something odd. I sometimes been finding that I wanted a chocolate at the end of lunch and it was chocolate and not generally something sweet. I decided to try and see if coffee would do instead. I made filter coffee and see if that did. It did. So I presumed caffeine fix, until I read the packet and found I was using decaffeinated! So that rules that one out.
I am taking this weekend quiet. Friday was my study day and I started putting together the introductory paper for the study day next week as well as serve breakfasts (forty four this week). Yesterday I did some shopping. I bought a long armed stapler as I need it for putting the booklets together. I did a Wordle of my thesis but not exactly. I also bought a cardigan and a pair of pyjamas. All my current summer ones are comfy but old variety and I spending the night in Woodbrooke Hall before the study day. Today I have been in, largely due to the Race for Life being on in Sheffield city centre. What I have learnt is that going to my placement church on such days is a nightmare of logistics, it might well be quicker by train and bus.
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