Chattering from a quiet weekend which was necessary after a busy week

Lets see about news at this end. Well last Monday was going to be one of those busy days that was not too hectic. I was helping someone from Linguistics about logistic regression and giving them general advice, in the end I suggested they gave a different statistic completely as that would make sense to the reader while the complex mathematical ones that used analogies from other statistical methodologies were most likely to confuse. Linguists are rather specialised in their approach to statistics, they tend to work with counts and the statistic they use are therefore specialised. This is not a problem for someone like me who has dealt with them on and off for over a decade, but it is a problem for those who are used to techniques that use other measurement techniques. There are not many subjects where it is more important to learn logistic regression and modelling of count data before you learn normal regression. On the afternoon I had Simon but only Simon so I could cope. I did not have writers group on the evening as it was half term but that was good as I had a supervision on the Tuesday.

However when I got home at lunch time and checked my personal email, there was an email from the Department of Theology and Religion at Birmingham telling of the postgraduate conference held by Society for the Study of Theology(SST). Now to get this in context, my doctorate is officially a in Theology (the Department of Theology and Religion, which is where my supervisor is based, offers a variety of subjects to be studied at doctoral level but not Congregational Studies so I ended up with the generic one). However as my training and my supervisors predilections tend more towards sociology of Religion, I normally follow the organisations associated with this. However I glanced at it as I do all emails from the department and stopped short. STT was holding a postgraduate conference and the title was “THEOLOGIANS AND THE CHURCH “. Well that picks up a major strand of my thought, how do congregations interact with tradition and with being Reformed that has to include theology.  Then I look at the date (5th and 6th December) and the closing date for enrolment and submission of abstracts (31st October) gulp! Do I really have the energy to turn things around in that short time. Anyhow I fire the email off to my supervisor and by the end of lunch time I know that his reading of the situation is exactly the same as mine.

Tuesday dawns and it is supervision day. It is one of those days when I felt like I was running on caffeine. I got to the station and there was a broken down train on the East Coast main line so all the trains from up North to Birmingham were delayed. Indeed the train before mine left in my train’s slot. This makes it easier to get through to Birmingham than going between slots as they just take the signals for the next train but it means from then on they have the wrong trains coming into Birmingham as the Reading alternates with a Plymouth train. Anyway I hung on for my train expecting that the train beforehand would be crowded (late trains nearly always are) and I had a booked seat on my train. Indeed mine was running even later. The Edgebaston campus was positively thronging with students who had started to soak in, so the computers were all busy in the main student common room in the arts Tower. I know somewhere in there there are Postgrad and staff rooms but I have never found them and I normally manage to find a networked computer when I want it. I also know there are other rooms at the ERI building for me to use when I am on campus but it is quite a walk and I have never been there.

By the time I saw my supervisor on the afternoon my brain had got working and decided that I may as well give a go at getting a paper ready, there was the think piece on hymns and theology or I could do something on the congregation’s engagement with theology. In the end I think I managed to have together a rough outline in my head of a possible paper that draws on both to make the argument that actually a lot of the congregations theological experience is channelled through worship and therefore when theology comes up in a congregation within the URC it is often related to worship.  In doing this I think I am able from my placements that the congregations relative silence around theology does not include debate about worship and that the demotic code that is used as a method of negotiating theological ideas without entering into debate draws highly upon the congregations worshipping experience. The paper is more complicated than that but that does as a fair summary.

Then on Wednesday it was back to work and I saw Margo and Toni. Toni is working on a content analysis of men’s magazines and it is slowly, slowly coming together. It relies on me being half a step ahead of them. So far I have managed it. On the afternoon I spent some time looking at NVivo on the managed service. Unfortunately it failed at the first hurdle, being able to get a NVivo data set that had been created elsewhere into the database. Oops. Anyway as when I went to the help files they clearly thought you should be able to, I suspect it would be easy to fix although there may need to be some trickery done.

Thursday was another work day, tackling a couple of consultations and other queries as well. Bob the information officer for the department is wanting to write something about what I do so I got a phone call for him and I also needed to tidy up for the week as I was due to go to an ASSESS conference the next day. I am getting more and more ambivalent about ASSESS, it is fairly useful as it gives me some insight into what IBM SPSS are planning but that information has got less and less over the years. When it was at St Williams college in York it was quite an event to go to despite the cold, but the Alcuin Centre in my experience is as cold and not as atmospheric. On the evening I sent off an email booking on the SST conference and packed my bag for the next day.

However middle of Thursday I night I woke and realised I am shivering although I am not cold. I mean shivering as well not shaking, I actually have a mild shake most of the time and when stressed it can become clearly visible, however I have never known my teeth chatter during it.. This was teeth chattering shivering. From past experience this normally means I have been running on slightly raised stress level for too long. The only thing I really know that helps it is slowing down and taking things easy. Ok so the logical thing was not to go to ASSESS. Not really a great loss from my perspective but still not something I liked doing. I needed to spend the day quietly. Well maybe it was fortuitous as there was a crisis over heating at the Breakfast and I got a phone call at 7:30 a.m. from Sarah saying could I come and look. So I did and then came back home, ate something and contacted work to say I would not be in before going back to bed and sleeping to around 1:30 p.m. by which time the shivers had finally departed. So I got up and eventually persuaded myself to do some reading. Oh I also managed to fill in the form for SST and find a B&B in central Edinburgh that had decent reports and was not too expensive.

Saturday I decided also should be a largely in day, I had a Tescos order coming and I needed it for writing up the words I had written in the week; it is on my blog  if you want to know how that went. Anyway the actual difficult task is the entry into the computer. I am often reading ahead rephrasing, checking references and so on while I type it in. It may have taken me only 2.5 hours to write initially but the putting it into the computer can well take over eight and I type faster than I write. Anyway I am 10% of the way through now and also about a week ahead of where I want to be word wise, so I am using next weeks writing time to draft the paper for the conference.

Today I spent most of the time writing an abstract for the conference paper. It is only 250 words long but it took me several hours to write. The problem is that normally I have had more time to think myself clear. There are a couple of things I would like to sort out and I was having to decide which to include in the paper and which to leave to later. I was worried that I would write seriously over the limit but as it was I was so cautious I had difficulty in writing 200 words (the limit was 250). It will be interesting to see if I can produce a 20 minute paper. I am still trying to think of which technology to actually type it in (Word or Powerpoint). I suspect I will go with Word but start thinking of doing the slides right from the start.

Chatter after an autumnal week

Its funny how having a single item on some-days can make the day seem overloaded, this is the way I felt around having an appointment for S. S is an overseas student who is researching the economic effects of AIDS in I thin Sub-Saharan Africa. A good enough research topic and one which would be interesting to here the results from. The problem is that I don’t believe a single one of his results due to the input of data being so poor. I have not seen him for a couple of years and I learnt he was relying on my keeping a good copy of the data (I had done so but more because I am pretty methodical over keeping data) rather than because I felt I ought). Anyway it was writers group on the evening and I was just hoping my selection would work for the reading. I got there and realised my either/or option had been interpreted as two separate poems so had to do a quick shuffle of papers. Secondly one of the poems I was reading for the first time (although I had sent it around the group the previous week) and I really wanted the groups feedback on that. They liked the selection so I decided to stick with it. Anyone got any idea how you select work for a reading because after five attempts I still don’t know.

I have it agreed that before a supervision I can have one work at home day to spend on my thesis (I think it might technically once a month but as I don’t always take one supervision I am not too fussed on that. This time I found that the only date I could take it was Tuesday, so I did and because my piece was already written for the supervision and with the proof readers and I was feeling the need for reading, I sat down and spent most of the day reading. I finished one book on the theory of what Religion is called Crossings and Dwellings by Thomas A Tweed. This is not because I need to define religion but because his understanding of religion picks up very much the ways I want to talk about congregational life. The theorists who share your metaphors are often worth reading to see what others have done with them. Then got onto Ravished by Beauty by Belden C. Lane  which is an attempt to try and iterate a Reformed ecological spirituality. No my thesis is not interested in ecology but I am interested in the way he has built a spirituality as I have to do that.The reason Jonathon Edwards was not picked up is the book has gone into hiding and I hope it surfaces soon. Actually reading days are also good mental health days and I have felt a lot livelier in work since.

Wednesday I had a course on teaching statistics. Not that I am planning on teaching statistics but I do need to keep contact with the statistics teachers in the university to do my job and this course which was part course, part social was a time to do that. One of the problems with my job is that the department has some measure of responsibility towards providing the statistical software that is widely taught, but nobody tells me what they are teaching so I normally find that we have a package on site only when people want it on the network and there is some difficulty so the people call me in to liase. I was at that from about 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. or later. Partly because there is a definite need to tackle a masters course that is causing problems and there were at least three different perspectives all agreeing that this needed tackling.

Thursday I went on another training course, this time actually for personal development as it was about influencing people. Useful if only because I am beginning to understand what I might need to do to be more effective in that side of my job that requires me to develop things. I am really good at one to one support on research issues but I also need to find ways to create cooperation so that more effective ways of providing support are forth coming. On the afternoon I spent dealing with a number of queries from Human Nutrition. One member of staff is failing to communicate with me there so I am finding she expects things and I have not done them because she has not asked. I therefore have a bit of a panic on this coming Monday, suvivable but I am sure I will find the time to do it.

Friday was my day off, first priority was to get the words written up for thesis, another 2226 words typed and you can hear more about how it is going on my thesis blog . Actually I find it interesting the way blogs attract interest. The blog this goes on is open and generally chatty with a lot of posts on it. However I have a third blog where I post occasional musings. This has a far lower postage rate, but has a much higher hit rate, and has been very high the last week or so with over 300 hits and I can’t find the link to it. I must admit the post linked to I linked to on Ship of Fools actually both the highest hitters have been posts I posted to say something at more length than I felt comfortable doing on a Bulletin Board so linked to from the ship.On the evening my writers group held its annual reading. This was held at Bank Street Arts Centre which is a bit out of the way behind the Cathedral.  It is a strange mix of buildings and feels a bit like a set of houses around an enclosed courtyard but none of the buildings that would have been the houses feel particularly substantial. The floors are on all sorts of levels and on an evening to get to the room where we hold the reading you need to go in one entrance, down a flight of steps to the courtyard and up another flight of step to the second entrance. All the steps are in the courtyard. They also have a cafe/bar which serves alcohol, coffee, cake and such on am most odd basis. The room we were using at the time had an exhibition of entry to Sheffield International Arts book Prize. These were actually quite intriguing and if people go during the day you can just walk in off the street and see it and other exhibitions.

Saturday my parents came over, I decided that I needed to know what they wanted to do and they said that was to buy wool for mum to knit a jumper for dad and would therefore like to go to John Lewis’. So I thought fine a single leisurely trip down town, especially once they decided they would like to eat out. Getting to John Lewis’ was easy, and fortunately there were only a limited number of patterns for men’s jumpers. So it only took half an hour to find a pattern. Then we had to find a wool, it had to be double knitting and dad wanted green and brown fleck. The only problem was that the only such wool was over £5.00 for 50g, yes it was very nice but that meant the jumper would cost seventy pounds. Mum baulked at that and suggested that we bought a jumper instead. This I saw was a non-starter with Dad for whom Mum knitting the jumper was at least half the point of getting the wool (knitting helps keep Mum’s brain and hands busy). So we put the wool down then went downstairs to buy socks for Dad, he wanted longer than average socks, eventually we found some black ones that would do. Having done this we went to find some lunch, ended up in Yates Pub opposite, very high marks for having food Dad was happy to eat (salmon and salad), very low marks for the amount of noise but with the volume such that you could not keep going over and over the knitting problem. At the end of the meal I spelt out the problem to them and we agreed we would go back and get Dad a green flecked wool instead of green and brown (I had spotted one earlier).  The other options was to try another wool shop or to buy Dad a jumper. So then back and re-found the pattern, got a ball of wool and handed it to the assistant (I was a bit deliberate over who I took their purchases too as I knew one lady really did know what she was doing). However disaster struck there were only thirteen balls and the pattern called for fourteen. However this assistant is canny and she checked the length of the wool, the length on the recommended wool was 120m per 50g, the length on the wool we chose was 150m per 50 g so we only needed 12! Phew. After that my shopping took very little time at all.

Today I was at service at St Andrew’s. Kirsty Thorpe  was preaching. She was peaching on it being 400 years to the day of the publishing of KJV. This certainly pleased Elizabeth Draper who told me at least twice how much she had enjoyed it. There must have been around thirty in the congregation although I suspect that numbers were reduced somewhat as one of Margaret Falls holidays was going away that afternoon and not all members are as committed as Jean and James who were at worship in the morning althoughgoing away on the afternoon. There were about thirty in the congregation. I feel a bit as if I am being pulled in all directions, the sound desk would like me back on the rota, the choir would like me to join and I also am aware that I fulfil a valuable role just by being a member of the congregation and listening to one or two people. The mix in worship was less widely spread than at Harvest although there was still a couple of faces I did not recognise. I am still too recently back to know whether they are new faces or faces that have come in the last four years.

After lunch I went to a healing service at Endcliffe Methodist Church. This service had been prompted by the slow recovery of Matthew (Jo and Ted’s foster son) whose heart stopped suddenly at the end of August just after they had got back from holiday. Medics have no idea what caused it to stop and it took them a while to get it going again and so there is brain damage. Matthew has also had a number of chest infections that have impeded his recovery. The service while acknowledging the prompt was not solely for Matthew and there were around thirty to forty people there. I ended up talking afterwards with one of the members there I knew through work and learnt that they are now a small congregation so I suspect there were quite a few people like myself who had come to pray for Matthew, Ted and Jo.  The service was quietly organised with lots of time for personal quiet prayer although I still had capacity (hunger?) for more. Once I have actually got myself to stop and be still I often don’t want to leave it. Songs were modern charismatic, which is what I expected and I suspect that there are still issues over the expression of anger but there were no big promises and just lots of time to pray, there was not even a laying on of hands although you could come up for prayer at the end. I walked back with Jo and Ted as they live on one of the possible routes home. While still on Endcliffe church steps we were accosted by a very drunk young man who just wanted to tell us he was a Christian and did so repeatedly although he seemed to think it left him free to denigrate others who were rude about him. Later on we were accosted by one of Matthew’s former school mates (junior school) who wanted to know how he was and had been praying for him (Roman Catholic).

From a golden autumn afternoon

Right  Monday was a normal day in work. I had said a while ago I would do an analysis for a senior academic who had had a paper bounced.  I am beginning to have one of the fabled skills of some of the older statisticians. That is to look at data and say what is going on with it. This actually only comes from have looked at lots and lots of data and getting a feel for when things work. So I did the analysis but my brain still nagged me so I looked at what I thought was going on. It showed up a much neater model indeed. In the end I sent in the report, and I will have to see what the outcome is. Anyway it does mean that I am starting to develop some skills in using R. I must remember to put that on my professional development log.

Actually it is ridiculous how much logging of professional development I have to do. Three different processes, none of them interlinked! One for my job, one for my study and one for my professional accreditation. The daft thing is the same thing can count in all three settings. The use of R is both for work and professional development, modeling using GAM techniques counts just for professional development. Thesis fortunately is not interested in either. I don’t object to developing professionally, I thrive on it, I don’t object to keeping a log, that seems sensible but having to keep three separate ones seems overkill.

In the evening was writers group. I  was glad to be back. There are once again more poets in the group. Over recent years since Faye  left we were down to tow, but we are now back up to three and maybe slightly more. Actually it is also a surprise to realise I am not the junior poet anymore. I am begin to know my own voice, and to have some feel for what works and what doesn’t in my opinion. This moves beyond the stage where I can say “I like that” or “I don’t like that”. However to choose successful poems for reading is difficult. I should have made up my mind mid week but I am dithering.

Tuesday I awoke feeling as if I had a seasonal bug, I am not even going to call it a cold as apart from making me feel off colour it otherwise has only created the occasional coughing bout. So I have been battling that. It so far seems to have responded to basically me landing on top of it, so plenty of vitamin C, echinacea, throat infection lozenges and hot lemom and honey cordial with ginger wine to send me to sleep when I went to bed early. I have not much idea what worked but it certainly has not boiled out.

Also I have been writing thesis this week. So one week down and at least forty left to go. You can read about it on my thesis blog . Actually the process of doing timed writing most mornings seems to generate a rush of energy for me. I give myself half and hour to write 400 words (I have re-set that to 500 as I am easily writing in excess of that each day and doing it for four days a week (still aiming at 2,000 words a week). It will be interesting to see if the pace keeps up. Actually I also suspect that at long last I am beginning to get some idea of what my thesis is. Some of this I suspect that a lot of my analysis actually occurs during writing.

This is officially a writing weekend but as I am ahead on the writing I really should be doing something about catching up on the readings. So I hope you will excuse my brevity.

Holiday and associated business

Sorry not to have written for three weeks, the explanation is holiday.

So what have I been upto. Monday 19th saw me at a supervision in Birmingham. On the whole this was straightforward, but at this distance feels slightly disjointed. I suspect in part having just come out of placement, going immediately on holiday and therefore not yet being in the process of writing up.. Tuesday was a busy work day and I therefore did not really start thinking about travelling until Wednesday although the car had been booked months in advance and the B&B.

As my parents were on holiday in the Lake District at Grange Over Sands in the Christian Hotel there, I stayed at New Ing Lodge in Shap. If anyone is looking for a relative small but pleasant hostel style accommodation plus some private rooms I can recommend it. I do not think any of the rooms are en-suite. They do do evening meals and also packed lunches. No TV as far as I could see but there is a guest lounge. I stopped at Thor

Then on the next day and into Scotland, I stopped in Caerlaverock WWT site  hoping to see some Barnacle Geese, they had started to arrive, but only 400 to date and I did not even see one of those. Unless like me you travel to the Rhins  from England I suspect few people have any idea of vast tracts of land there are around the Solway Firth. The geese could have been anywhere in a stretch of land probably about twenty miles broad and 100 miles long. Indeed I knew there was a good chance if I had been bothered that I could have seen those birds on the sands outside Wigtown. The site has developed since I was last there with now a proper cafe (when staffed)  rather than a help yourself and honesty box. However the hides are just the same it is a pleasant place for a stroll even if the best photo I got was of berries.

Then onto Newton Stewart where Morag had arranged to meet me the night before. She was finishing work relatively early and there is a decent Christian coffee shop, well the coffee and the cake is good, although the Christian books and tat leaves something to be desired. Yes I did browse because Morag was towards the end of her estimated time of arrival and found absolutely nothing amongst it that brought up any more than mild interest..Then she went onto meet up with girls who had swimming lessons and I went onto Diane’s to unload. At 7:30 p.m. she was busy telling the girls she might have been mistaken and it was only tomorrow that I was coming up! Needless to say I turned up about 8:00 p.m as planned.

The visit was deliberately times to coincide with the Wigtown Book Festival  but it also coincided with an Open Door Day in the area and the last service of the summer in Kirk Covenant. For those who know Kirk Covenant (I forget which saint it is actually dedicated to. Not St Medan, that goes to the new church in the centre of Drummore (this is the former Free Church of Scotland building which Kirk Covenant is the old Parish Church).. What I also spotted on the Saturday was Logan Gardens was participating in the Open Day so Morag and I after taking Cait to Kirk Covenant went on with her to Logan Garden.  At which point Morag found that as long as she just went in for coffee she could get in free any time in September and October. Jenny and Tony were across in Withorn for an archeology day with the Whithorn Trust.

The rest of the week was a mix between days spent over at Wigtown or Newton Stewart taking part in the Wigtown book festival and dog days. Do days are the sunny sort of days when I borrow Dora, such days normally started with a grooming session, getting rid of matted hair and then long walks on the beach. I realised after the first of these that I really needed a portable dog drinking bowl and a flask of water, plus a book as we preferred to stay on the beach even when not walking than sitting in the house. Dora loves chasing birds but as she is a bearded collie whose hair rather gets in the way of sight she does not chase them until they are airborne so I suspect there is little chance of her ever catching one. The biggest problem is therefore that she will go out amongst the rocks after them, loose line of sight and get into difficulties in the water without you realising it. I am not sure she knows enough to realise that jumping off a set of rocks in hot pursuit of birds might does not mean the water is shallow and I rather not find out the hard way.

On the Friday, family politics were getting to me and I decided I needed a break. So I decided to go on an explore. I took the car and went for a drive around the North Rhins. So I drove to Stranraer and then headed west from the main route South. There is no route directly North unless you take the ferry and the one east goes off the Rhins. From there on I had no plan, not timetable and no aim except to find what I would find.  Some of the decision was taken for me by a combine harvester that was, I presume, being moved between farms (anyway it was moving quite a distance along the road. At a traffic junction it headed toward Lewalt and as I was behind it I headed towards Kirkcolm, from there it was just following the road.  I did get to the Corsewall Lighthouse and then came back to Portpatrick. By then it had taken to raining although there were still families with small children on the beach at high tide. I did wonder at it, although you could get icecream, the amusement arcade was shut and the public toilets were all locked. Then of course it probably would not be British seaside summer if it wasn’t like that.

Saturday resulted in me taking the girls to Logan Gardens just to get them out of the house and therefore out of Tony’s and Morag’s feet. It really was not the day for going around the gardens as the weather was a fine drizzle but at least there were ice-creams and coffee in the cafe. Sunday we were over at Wigtown. I took Jenny to look for a geocache while Cait was in a session. We are still geocaching virgins having yet to find a single cache after looking for three of them! We are close but we just never seem able to find the box. Oh well we have three locally we know the vicinity of and at least another two that should be easy reach.

Monday Morag had the day off and once she had done a couple of jobs in Stranraer we met at Logan Garden cafe and drank coffee and talked and talked and talked. It is really funny but there are just things we don’t talk about in front of most of the family (Cait is the exception we seem to suspect that she will understand or be so caught up in her own imaginative life she won’t notice) . I suspect it is the suspicion that both of us have that there is more to life than meets the eye and that other ways of looking at it are valuable.

Tuesday and Wednesday were days for travelling back. I stayed over at my parents and therefore was back by 11:30 p.m. and had returned the car by 1:00 p.m.. Petrol prices can vary widely at Tebay Total station Southbound it was 147p a litre, on the A57 between Mottram and Glossop (I think near Gamesly) it was just over 130p (apparently the Oldham garage my Dad uses is also about that)! Stockport was134p and Sheffield 136p which is close to what it was in Newton Stewart which was cheaper than Dumfries. So please don’t ask me what determines price.

For those who like photos there is a selection of them from the holiday  . I think I took most of them but Jenny and Cait contributed some.

Thursday and Friday saw me back in work and I am aware I really need to do some thinking of the direction my job is going in. There is something that needs tackling and I really should but if I do it will mean I need to do things I am not good at. It also means getting a number of departments to admit that they are in a mess and need help! The difference I see when I have somebody who knows what is required and I work with them is huge! Masters projects can produce academic publications but the standards are a lot higher than people think. So many masters projects are not even at the level they should be for masters projects simply because the students are not given the support they need to reach that level.

Saturday I started planning the detail of writing my thesis. I am used to doing it for science based projects but having to do it for a qualitative one was interesting. Firstly I knew the standard approach was not appropriate but what was. It took a couple of books and a lot of thinking. and I think I have a route map through. Maybe I need to split it into two chapters but at present I will treat it as one. I am basically splitting each chapter into 2000 word essays that I plan to write in a week. We will see if this will work. I have also set up a blog to record my progress  I hope to update weekly, it will help me to keep this up if people check it and comment on it, it gives me a feeling of people supporting me.

Today I went to St Andrews, it was harvest, there seemed to have been a URChins (a toddler aimed worship activity) beforehand which fed in, there was also some Back to Church Sunday activity so not your normal Sunday. Then is there ever a normal Sunday? The core group of the congregation that was there twenty years ago was smaller and older but there was at the same time so many bits around them. URChins had around eight boys up to about eight years of age there, including the Middleton boys, both of the Wheats and Margaret Falls grandson and also a couple of lads from a family I did not recognise. There were several older people there who I did not recognise including Donald Letham’s daughter and somebody who definitely are coming to sing with the choir. Also two guys from the Broomhall Breakfast came I think for a first time and another guy I think came in off the streets and literally slept from 10:00 a.m. to 2 p.m. when we had to wake him as we were clearing up after harvest lunch.  It felt different, on the one hand there appears to be a greater number of people who are at least semi-attached, on the other hand the central core seems still pretty much still self contained.