On the day after Christmas

The end of term year ended up as busy as the last six months. I did not manage the University Carol Service as I was teaching on that day, and I also missed the Sunday before Christmas at St Andrews as a cold was coming on and I decided that curling up in bed and trying to get rid of it pdq was a good idea. If I can catch a cold on first indication treat it pretty fiercely (stay indoors, bed rest, vitamin C, eucalyptus and tea tree oil etc etc) then sometimes I give my body enough of a boost that it manages to fight off the cold before it gets a hold. If I don’t then I am in for the full blown thing.

The Monday and Tuesday of the week before Christmas I was in work and busy, but the Wednesday which was my last day in work was works party and therefore even though I was not going I felt justified in not making any appointments for anyone to see me. This gave me a lovely day, when I just pottered around doing all the sorty out things that needed doing but had been sidelined in the general melee of business. So my desk is slightly tidier than it was, I think I have sorted the emails for next year and so on.

On the evening I had an invite around to a friends open house. It was one of those occasions when I went knowing I would know almost no-one. It turned out to be a great event. The date is set because it is her son’s birthday but the children have the “party” before and the adults start turning up about 7:00 p.m. for chilli including vegetarian and wine. You have people from all ages spread through the house talking to each others from a vast variety of ways of life although University employees y managed to buy a good selection. Sam my nephew has unusual tastes for a thirteen year old lad (and always has had), they therefore ordered one dish with very hot peppers in it (Sam loves these). We managed to warn my father not to have that dish but mum did not pick up on this and got one of those peppers in her mouth and it spoilt the other wise superb meal for her.

Friday I took easily, walked into Stockport on the day basically to buy things I had forgotten a timer and a carton of Christmas compote. The whole place was busy but not excessively, think a normal Saturday afternoon rather than the last before Christmas.  I did a similar trip on Saturday to Heaton Moor for cough medicine for my Mum who had caught a cold off my father but while his inhabited his nose, hers went directly to her chest. Unfortunately the closest one was shut. I suspect for holiday season at least as the roller shutters were full down. On the evening I decided that rather than go with my parents to their church I would see what the local Anglican was offering at 7:30pm on Christmas eveniannah buying a chinese for evening meal. They had come down so Mum and Dad could be involved in preparing the veg for Christmas dinner. They had some difficulty finding the local chinese as the onilm.  By the way has anyone seen a non-corny portrayal of an angel on film. My tendency is to think that you are better off not portraying those pieces as they always fail. This one was very average for films.

Christmas day was as normal. Mum and Dad made it to church in the morning as there was no snow this year. Dad said it was as well as could be expected, it being Christmas day and all age worship. Then they had a sandwich before we went up to Cathy’s for the main meal at around 3pm.  The  table needed setting as I was bringing the table cloth and therefore they had not managed to set it. Meanwhile Hannah and Sam managed to open their presents. In fact as there was a twenty minute wait we all did, but Sam and Hannah’s were acting as Santa’s elves and handing them out. Sam dutifully hid his Birthday presents behind the sofa so as not to open them until his Birthday (tomorrow).

The meal was delicious as per usual, but what should I expect from my sister. Unfortunately the  TV had removed the Gruffalo from our after lunch slot and replace it with Ratatouille, which is fine but not the same.  Admittedly this was ng. I am cautious to call it a service, it consisted of a film of the nativity interspersed with Christmas Carols. I don’t even think the carols were chosen with how they would relate to the film.  By the way has anyone seen a non-corny portrayal of an angel on film. My tendency is to think that you are better off not portraying those pieces as they always fail. This one was very average for films.

Christmas day was as normal. Mum and Dad made it to church in the morning as there was no snow this year. Dad said it was as well as could be expected, it being Christmas day and all age worship. Then they had a sandwich before we went up to Cathy’s for the main meal at around 3pm.  The  table needed setting as I was bringing the table cloth and therefore they had not managed to set it. Meanwhile Hannah and Sam managed to open their presents. In fact as there was a twenty minute wait we all did, but Sam and Hannah’s were acting as Santa’s elves and handing them out. Sam dutifully hid his Birthday presents behind the sofa so as not to open them until his Birthday (tomorrow).

The meal was delicious as per usual, but what should I expect from my sister. Unfortunately the  TV had removed the Gruffalo from our after lunch slot and replace it with Ratatouille, which is fine but not the same.  Admittedly this was because a Gruffalo’s Child was on later but still the Gruffalo was just about the right level for after Christmas dinner and Ratatouille was too sophisticated and complex. Yes I cope with complex every day of my life, but after Christmas lunch I want simplicity.

Anyway we came home about 7 O’Clock and Dad decided at 10 pm at night that we MUST eat up the rest of the smoked Salmon that evening. Needless to say we have not felt much like food today so much so that Dad has changed the evening meal from soup from scrambled eggs. I am not sure I am even up to soup.

Summary of the year or Round Robin

This is my attempt to give an impression of the past year, it therefore does not handle the news of the last week in particular, so apologies for those faithful followers of Chattering for whom much of this can be repetition. I am going to work this through on themes rather than give a month by month account.

Firstly therefore let me turn to my PhD. I am now in the final part of the process prior to submission and that is actually writing it up. This is not the same as being a student in “writing up” state, I need to get a pretty good first draft done by the end of June 2012 if I am to be allowed to be in that state from September 2012, the formal “writing up” state is for people close on submission, I am therefore still a fully enrolled student. However it does means I am no longer doing active field work and and am spending a lot of time either with pen and paper, computer or checking books. It also means I have stopped going over to Herringthorpe URC on a regular basis. It was quite a strange feeling to be leaving doing placements after four years. Herringthorpe was a good congregation, different from St Andrews Chesterfield. Some of the differences were just down to dynamics of size, Herringthorpe is almost twice the size of St Andrews Chesterfield and things that functioned at St Andrews failed at Herringthorpe. Not much with respect to the thesis, but there were times when I realised many people at Herringthorpe behaved as if it was the size of St Andrews, for instance you were expected to know who the treasurer was by just mentioning his name. Fine at St Andrews where you did not need even that often as the treasurer was the one with the cheque book, but at Herringthorpe more difficult particularly as they did not fill any sort of treasurer type roles during morning worship. Another thing which became clear is that the two strands “Presbyterian” and “Congregational” related differently to their traditions. Presbyterians were always conscious of being Presbyterian and doing things in that way. Congregationalists never named the tradition, it was always this is “how we do it”. They never felt any need to identify it as “Congregational” or “Independent” or “Reformed”. I suspect to many English Presbyterians this looked like a lack of tradition when in actual fact it is the mark of a dominant tradition. Anyway  with now writing up I have started a blog which keeps notes of my progress. If you want to know how I am doing please make a note of it. Finally as you will see there, the Society for the Study of Theology held a postgraduate meeting in Edinburgh a few weeks back and I presented a paper at that. I am not planning on writing up the paper for publication at present but might well do so once my thesis is done as it is practically publication ready.

Work wise, the year has been more of the same. That does not mean no change, it does mean that for the most part the style has not changed. Perhaps the biggest change is that I more and more being consulted and then cited as a resource during research bids. This means that I am in the process from the start. Some of this is actually down to the fact that I can talk a number of research dialects and therefore am a pretty good translator of ideas between different departments who are doing research. I think I am involved in two to three active bids. It will be interesting to see what comes out. I am also moving some of my teaching into videos just to cope with demand. I am not able (and never have been) to meet the demand for this particular course. My real reason for not trying this earlier is that I do not see it as a particularly good course, very old fashioned talking head. Anyway my hand has been forced and I now need to find the time to actually get it into a video form. I suppose equally remarkable is this year I have not moved offices but am still in the same one as last Christmas, according to estates we should be moving out of there about Easter time. This is a slight delay on the original date for leaving the offices which was sometime in mid 2000.

Health wise my energy levels are improving an enabling me to cope with both the thesis and the increased work load at work. Nothing major just the slow improvement that keeps happening, it is of course far too slow for my liking and I always have a tendency to over stretch myself. I still get migraines but these are less frequent so maybe I am getting better at pacing. Unfortunately the same could not be said for all around. The New Year started with the news on Ship-of-Fools that the person who was the brains behind the bulletin boards (Erin) died very suddenly from flu at the age of thirty-nine. Dad has also lost several  friends, this started with the death quite suddenly of Roger Tomes a long term colleague of his, then in the autumn Doug Thacker died, at a respectable age of 83, but they had known each other since University days and kept in touch and finally Fred Able died. To crown things for him his Aunt died in November. She was in her nineties and family relationships had been distant for a while but she was also the last of that generation to die.

Other family news seems to fairly mundane. Mum and Dad tick along, alternately wondering at how well they manage and at other times getting on each others nerves. Mum is doing particularly physically and Dad is doing very well mentally, but the reverse could not be said. However one compensates for the other, and they seem to keep going. They had a holiday at the Christian hotel in Grange over Sands which seemed to go well despite the weather. The advantage of doing it this was was the chance to have company in an evening. Cathy and family seem to doing fine. Adrian, Cathy’s husband, was made redundant just before Christmas and after three or four months of looking and not finding anything he particularly wanted he decided to go solo. He is picking up a decent amount of work, partly because his former firm is passing work in his direction, but he is also making contacts elsewhere. Sam is doing well at school, still very good on the violin and at swimming with an interest in astrophysics. Hannah seems to be doing well, is much better at settling to read than Sam ever was and is enjoying dancing as well as swimming although in that she will never make Sam’s class.

I spent New Year up with my God family and again went up for almost a fortnight at the end of September beginning of October. My God-daughters are doing well though both have changed schools. Jenny because she was going up to high school and therefore travels now to Stranraer everyday and Cait because she became quite unhappy at the local school. The timing of the autumn rather than spring one, was partly due to Morag’s study pattern and partly because the Wigtown Festival was on at that time. However it worked really well for me as it allowed me to have a break between placement and writing up. In some ways it was a quieter holiday than previous ones, despite there being a lot on at Wigtown, I was not in the mood for setting out at the start of day and coming in late to attend things I was only vaguely interested in. Two of the days I just spent looking after Dora their dog, combing her hair and taking her for long walks along the beach during which she chased any seagulls that decided to take off into the air. While they were sat on the shore she really was not that interested. I will hopefully be up with them again for New Year.

So now all that remains I think is to wish you all that your lives may be touched by the joy that comes at Christmas and that during the coming year you might have the energy to meet the challenges and enjoy your achievements.

On a winters evening

I got to Edinburgh on time and headed Northwards along the Dundass Road, towards the B&B. It is not far, it was cold and the lights in Central Edinburgh  were bright. These days like many city centres they have fairgrounds running in the centre of town. Princess Street was shut due to work on the trams but this just meant the fair had spilt out onto the road. The B&B was comfy, I had opted for a room without a bathroom but was slightly put out to discover that the bathroom was on another floor. The room however met my standards of comfortable. That is they had a table/desk in the room. So many rooms have nowhere you can really write a letter or read in comfort.


On the evening I met friends off Ship of Fools.We met up at Ma Bells, as I was walking up there I noticed that there seemed to be snow on the ground. This was confirmed by ship of fools friends I met at The Bow Bar  which was a small bar serving a huge range of whisky, although most of the time we drank ginger beer. We then went on to look for food, unfortunately at this point we got fooled by a restaurant that still had out its early evening menu and when we got in the price were about double what we were expecting. So we ordered starters and sides and I really don’t know how I could have eaten more than what I got.Talk was varied, including one or two St Andrews University acquaintances and how they were doing, talk of J.K Rowlings prior to Harry Potter, that Anglican hegemony on Ship of Fools and so on. One of the people there was something like a Doctor of Epidemiology only because she could not be a Doctor of what she wanted to be, Doctor of Pain, her speciality is pain management. Of the five of us three were involved in the conference the next day. Another was a househusband waiting to be a full time carer, his wife’s career in Mechanical Engineering had took off in a way that his in English literature/philosophy hadn’t.


My father was right in part about New College being cold. That was the heat was very unevenly spread. On the Tuesday I thought the whole college was cold but from Wednesday lunch time on I ended up in too warm rooms. The previous evening it had been mentioned that it was part of J.K Rowlings inspiration for Hogwarts. Having been inside it I could say that it was not just the impressive front. It does have a splendid dining area and ancient halls as well, but the big thing was just how complex the internal layout was. It was clearly a building that had been built and rebuilt over the years. Some of the seminar rooms had windows for the lower half of the room! Flights of stairs seemed to go off at random and I am not at all sure how New College would have got on with standard University room numbering. For those unused to it the numbering usually consists of two numbers, the first being the floor and the second the room with either 0 or G being used for ground. So my office at work is something like 2.17 (second floor, room 17) and my supervisors at Birmingham is something like 8.21, eighth floor, room 21.

Well there were enough URCs to have URC seminar as that is what seemed to be where I did my paper. I suspect that ironically, my cafe paper, which is on ethnography of worship would have had a higher attendance. I also suspect that being put in a seminar labelled Reformed theology put people off. I later sat through a paper of Schleiermacher and his eucharistic theology. The thing is that I was reminded just how easy it is for me to inhabit his thinking without having done major reading, I know the corrolaries and the ramification before the speaker stated them. It is something I nearly always can do when dealing with Reformed thinkers but not when dealing with theologians in other traditions. That does not mean I have to agree with the Reformed thinkers, it just means I know where they are coming from. I have written a more indepth blog about my assessment of the conference on my thesis blog


Travelling back was interesting. I got down to pick up my case from left luggage (the choice of hiking it up the hill to New College and then through the stair filled corridors, or paying £7 for left luggage at Waverley, meant leaving it at Waverley won) just in time to get the last direct train to Sheffield (it leaves just after 6pm). Unfortunately the weather had caused a train ahead of it from Glasgow to fail and it was running about an hour late. The thing is when a train is that late it tends to get later and later, so instead of getting in around 9 p.m., it was after 11 p.m. Fortunately I had booked the next day off work as recovery time. However I did get a really good taxi driver who not only knew where my flat was (a rarity) but got my bag out of the cab.


Thursday and I was back into work, actually not much happening but I managed to get up a short video on how to produce evidence for working, but by the evening my head was aching and I decided that there was possibly a migraine on the way and I better go home and see if an early night would fix it. Unfortunately the next day the dregs stayed with me.  The only thing I actually did was to put a plastic layer over a window that does not shut properly, as this is right by my thesis computer I wanted to stop the draft that came in through the crack and made that place uncomfortable. 

However I managed to go to the Dicksons for evening meal. It was a good time although I was not really hungry. The previous weekend they had been celebrating their golden wedding. This included a couple of meals out and cake and champagne at the church. Unfortunately I then went and forgot to take my medicine so yesterday although I managed to write and get to the station to try and sort tickets I was sort of off colour, and today I have felt fragile but made it to church. The congregation is interesting, there is probably a better spread of ages than when I joined almost twenty years ago, but that is largely due to the loss of people at the older end. The recruitment at the younger end remains much the same. The problem is that it is not high enough to sustain the congregation. However the way I was feeling I just drank coffee and then came home to sleep for a couple of hours and am now feeling much better.

Chattering on a train ot Edinburgh

It is about a fortnight since I last wrote. I will try a thematic rather than a day by day diary. Work has been busy, too busy at times as I can see items slipping off my to-do list by me not getting time to do them. I am at one trying to get a course I give onto video, don’t worry I won’t be appearing, only my voice and what is on the computer screen! The problem was when I agreed to it I thought it would simply be recording the course I had giving, nice easy and simple. However the software is on my computer in my office. That means I need to record it separately. If I am doing that it makes sense to record it in five minute to ten minute segments and not as the whole hour. If I am doing that it also makes sense to upgrade it to the most recent form of the software. In other work what would have been a three hours of work is not going to take more like thirty hours and I need to find the time. This is not helped by the fact that I am very busy with lots of things going on that are taking me out of the office.

The first of these was I had a trip down to Birmingham for a supervision session. It was one of those rare occasions where there really was nothing to talk about, the stuff I was writing for my thesis was long winded but otherwise largely fine. One section of about a thousand words was really in the wrong section and another bit needed cutting but otherwise not much. I have it down in too much detail at present and will need to shorten it at some stage. This is not surprising, I am aware of writing in detail in order to delay when I have to write something more difficult. Nor had Google scholar been finding anything particularly interesting to read. Sometimes it turns up that is very useful; other times it turns up things with no connection at all. I like to do it at Birmingham as it saves me having to do complex log ins. However as I discovered yesterday my machine at homes seems to know when Birmingham has a registration and when Sheffield has and will ask me for the relevant login! I was impressed especially as I got hold of the original of a paper I have quite a tendency to quote.

Writing is going smoothly with still around two thousand words a week. I have written about using writing as an analytic technique, more accurately creative writing. The whole process of re-creating a person or an event forces you to think of details that you just pass over when experiencing. For instance at St Andrews the kitchen was down the hall, therefore if they have coffee after church they had to somehow get hot water into the church. When I had coffee after church it just happened, but when I sit down to describe it I am faced with “how did they do that?” question. Now that fact has no real relevance to my thesis, but when I a person acts in a certain way perhaps makes a speech I need to work out why, not just accept it as happened and that is often very theoretically insightful. For instance why was it Bill who found the way through and not Ethel, why does the Pentecostalism of A grate at Herringthorpe but that of his close friend B just sits happily and so on. These are questions novelists are used to asking themselves, what seems odd is the no ethnographer has spotted this connection between portrayal and analysis. As an ethnographer my first resource is my notes and interviews and not my imagination but I am still faced with the conumdrum. I also have started the first serious theoretical piece in that I have started writing where my research is with respect to the methodological research tradition. It is pretty much mainstream ethnography but at the more postmodern/playful end. That means a variety of things, firstly I can and do write in the first person when it is me who does something, I also need to give an account of my research position and to reflect on the way characteristics of my identity have interplayed with my research. Perhaps more controversial is my use of auto-ethnography to try and establish a space other than the congregations themselves from which I can talk of the Reformed tradition or more accurately what it means to be a Reformed Christian within the URC at the start of the twenty first century. The account because it is me, this is a piece of academic research and because what I am is partly because of what others have been, will involve interacting with the literature of the tradition but it is not simply another formulation it is an attempt to try and tease out how I personally experience the tradition.

Yes I was on strike on Wednesday 30th November, the UCU was out and as I belong to the UCU I was out. This had an interesting effect of my work and I suspect of many academic staff, in that what actually happened was the work got scrunched up into the remaining working days in the week. This actually meant very little time to do the background work. This was not helped at all by the fact that I discovered that I had manage to do an analysis on a partial data set on Friday rather than the full one and that when I did the full one something I thought did not happen appeared to happen. I need to find what is wrong with the graph, I suspect it is the form it is in, in which case it is easy to rectify, but it won’t be rectified until Thursday as I am at a conference at the start of this week. I am also acting as a “translator” between computer science and human nutrition on quite a big research proposal. It was interesting, at times the computer scientists were assuming I was a nutritionist, when in actual fact I had just been working on with the nutrition researcher for nineteen years. I probably if pushed could also do a good impression of a researcher into kidney disease.

Last weekend and the reason I did not post was that I was at my parents. They had been down to my great aunts funeral and my Mum was quite taken with this part of my father’s family who she really does not know. To be fair Dad only knows those of his generation, the paths divided I suspect about the time he went out to South Africa and they did not reconnect when he returned. This Great Aunt who died was in her nineties but was also an aunt by marriage and I think married to a brother who was younger than my Gran. There is not much prospect of us connecting as they seem to be spread throughout Southern England and we are solidly Northern in residence. There is now I think no known relatives of Dad’s in Birmingham. Other than this they seem to be getting on. We had a massive hunt for a pattern for the jumper Mum is knitting for Dad, only for Dad to eventually find it in his study. So I have now tied the pattern to my Mum’s knitting bag. The only difficulty was that the trains there and back were standing room only! I was shattered by the time I got in despite the fact that I got a fairly good standing space.

Today has been a bit of a learning experience. I picked up my purse when I went to the station but forgot to check my debit card was in it. It normally is but yesterday I ordered a book for my thesis and forgot to put it back! So I ended up at the station with plenty of time but unable to get my ticket. Only option really was to buy another and I went to the desk in trepidation expecting it to be very expensive. It cost only about twenty pounds more than my original (I just hope I can cancel the tickets and get some sort of refund as it is still not the sort of money I like to toss about. I fortunately (due to previous experience) was carrying an alternative credit card. I really must see if I can find a solution to this. I really am not sure that apart from going to London there is much point in getting saver tickets. London prices are just ridiculous if you do not buy in advance, but when not doing so, the difference is much smaller.