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.