Jengie Jon's Chatterings

From a Snowy Sheffield

2012-02-05T12:32:00.000-08:00

This week has been cold. That may have been a good thing as it has encouraged me to spend time indoors doing research type things. The temptation to go out for extra shopping or such just did not exist. That said I still made writers on Monday. The room was struggling to get to 18°C during writers group. This is NOT due to the thermostat but to the power of the radiator and the outside walls. I suspect it would do better if there was someone in the church or there was someone other than Jugglers in the hall. The jugglers require minimal heat and often will even then leave outside doors open. The poem I took this week was well accepted, I even got thanked for bringing it. I wonder if I should put it on my good list. The one for this coming week is just fun, I took the class exercise and wrote a piece that is quite a bit outside my normal style. I was surprised at how easy it was once I got the voice. Maybe I should try for the rest of term writing pieces in other voices.

Tuesdaymy body through a wobbler in the morning. I will probably register it as a migraine which is close enough. Basically not wanting to cope with things like light and sound or any other stimulus. All I need is time keeping quiet and my body will normalise and I can cope. I come out of such episodes far quicker than a migraine although they can cause quandaries for those watching. I thought I was going to have the afternoon to prepare for the course I was doing the next day and also to pick up other things only to find I was suddenly in demand at all directions at once. This included a useful contact and also another research proposal. On the evening Mum and Dad rang to say Aunty Jean (or Granny Jean for Sam and Hannah) is coming over this summer during July

Wednesday I had a session working through a paper in the morning and then went onto teach the final course of this set. I had a turn out of 125% i.e. four said they were coming and five turned up. I told the group that they were responsible for their learning and that if they wanted something repeated, or me to go slower or such, just to ask. It proved one of the most engaged and demanding groups I have had for a long time. I finished at 4:30 but had to turn them out at 5:00 p.m. (I am pretty sure the Hicks building starts closing then). I suspect given the opportunity they would have happily stayed until 6:00 p.m.

Thursday I was in to present a review of an analysis and then to recreate a data set into Nvivo 8 which we already had in NVivo 9 and see what it brought up. This was because the people who were supposed to do it were finding that NVivo 9 was not stable on their machine. This is typical of the medical school which has a lot of under spec machines around and is not helped by QSR saying NVivo runs on machines where it clearly does not with any reliability. Anyway I hope the girls have been able to do the little bit that I left them to do.

Friday I went to breakfast, first time in a few weeks for various reasons. The numbers were down we suspect due to the cold. If you are somewhere warm, coming out even for a fried breakfast is not necessarily going to be your top priority in temperatures like those on Friday. There was a girl from Ghana asking whether England ever got warm. It is such a difficult question to answer. Yes it does but it might well not be the sort of warm you are expecting, really does not cut much ice. Anyway afterwards I went down town to basically food shop. I must admit I have a weakness at present and that is for cheap scarves that a market vendor has started selling outside Boots. Two of the stalls are staffed by girls of oriental extraction who seem to have very limited English. Anyway they sell large very fine (as in thin) scarves and always seem to have a different selection. As they are relatively cheap I normally end up buying one or two. Part of this is that after years of earache I like having a warm neck (hence to polo-neck jumpers) but the other thing is that the scarves soften what can be a rather harsh look. So at present I am playing with using them. The only problem is wine and chocolate are not the in colours at present. The rest of the day was spent on bits and pieces including doing some writing up for thesis.

Saturday was a thesis day, the morning was spent finishing the writing up from the week. There were bits of analysis to do and other things to track down. I am beginning to wonder if former Presbyterian churches are more dispersed than former Congregational ones or whether that is just a mark of how they relate to the area around the church. They feel more disconnected so they must be more dispersed. There is no evidence of an actual difference in the distance members travel to either of my placement churches. The thing was I think that St Andrews Chesterfield would be surprised at how far people were travelling to come to Herringthorpe. Feeling as if the congregation belongs to a locality does not mean that the majority of the congregation live within a mile of the church. Actually though I removed them from the analysis, some people were travelling from Retford to Herringthorpe! On the afternoon I started to put together my dataset. This thing is both boring and addictive. I thought I would stop at seven in the evening so as to do chores only to find I had continued doing it to eight! The snow started coming down early evening and continued well into the night. It was funny as it was fine snow and a lot of the time it did not look like it was snowing but it the snow on the ground kept getting deeper and deeper.

This morning I was watching to see if church was on, well waiting to see a car in the carpark. People were estimating about 6 inches for this area of Sheffield. The communion service was done on reduced numbers but the Dickson’s did two runs to get people to church bringing David, Derek, Sarah, Aileen and John as well as being duty elders. The service went well. Fortunately the Cookes offered to take Sarah and David home which meant only a single trip home. Maybe the church should buy them a four wheel drive minibus. However Mary came to St Andrews as she could walk to us but was not sure whether she could get up the hill to St Marks. the snow has been slowly thawing and is due to continue doing so until tomorrow night (see XCWeather although I have also checked the Met Office and the BBC weather forecast)

Chattering after a tiring couple of weeks

2012-01-29T10:47:00.000-08:00

The weeks have been tiring. Work is still busy, I have been expecting it to quieten down since last September time and it hasn’t yet. I wonder if this is going to be the pattern of things from now on. I don’t mind being busy but when as busy as last week I am actually over stretched and I fail to do things I need to do because I have not got the time. Much of this is consultancy but I am still doing the odd bit of statistical work for people but not finding that I have much time.

Work is taking its time to sort out the situation it got into. I think there are real problems behind this. There is a view that people will get on with who they are put with regardless. This can cause major problem in a department that chooses people for the special skills. The skills seem to come with add idiosyncrasies and when we ignore them we end up with head on personality clashes. The other thing is that I suspect the rules applied now will be scrapped within two years and that will lead to some very grieved people and in the mean time a sort of guerrilla warfare over “time out rooms” with people trying to claim them as theirs. However that is not my concern. I will see what they come up with.

The other thing that happened was I was teaching the course that got cancelled the week before last, this Thursday. On the morning I realised I had not had a reply from someone who I was hoping would check the room for me or tell me who to go to. The licensing situation needed checking. Well not to worry I thought if the XP disks don’t work the managed service would do. I got there the XP disks were not working as the license had timed out. No need to panic just swap them. I even managed to get all of the managed hard disks loaded. Then I started one up and they were not the modern managed service, indeed they were at least three years old! The problem with this is the license for the old version of the software I was teaching was no longer available. PANIC, I had a class of about twelve and no machines. I am therefore very grateful to the Helpdesk who came up pretty swiftly and put fresh license codes into the XP disks.

Last weekend I was partly writing and partly editing my methodology chapter. I only managed to get rid of under 2000 words, which is problematic as I also added a section of about 2000 words on why I chose the methodology I did. Fortunately in finding that I found that one argument I had made had been made quite clearly in the literature in about 2003, there was therefore no reason to be as explicit as I was being. I still need to do more work on cutting down on the number of words. This weekend I have got the introductory bit to my data chapter on location out. Therefore I am going to have to write about actual data next week. I am going to have to deal with the wider location I think first.This is fun as it involves not just the settings but also the ways that different congregations understand themselves as connected to the locality. There are in some-ways such similarities and yet differences. Some of this includes an analysis of distance from members homes. There is also a second problem of the fact that the wider communities that they relate to also understood themselves differently. Anyway if you want to catch up more formally there is more on my thesis blog. What I will say is writing is far more consuming than I expected. It seems to infiltrate into everything and I am not one of those people who felt “I am only writing up, I can do other things”. Don’t get me wrong I suspect some of this is because I actually enjoy doing it, or like the time and challenge. I feel a slight high on going into work if I have done my half and hour of writing before I go in. I tend to resent weeks when I don’t get a full day dedicated to writing because of other commitments.

Writers group has started meeting again, which is a good thing although the heating system decided to loose pressure and not to heat up the first time. This meant that I turned up with grandpa’s blower heater (I really must put the plug on that better, I changed the fuse once and did not put it back particularly well). We are beginning to think about publishing more work this year. The options include web publishing. This is something I know I can do, in that I have the skills but it is not something that I have the time to do at present. I can act as guide but I certainly can’t do it. It also depends on what they want to do. The big thing with a website is to get the publicity it needs to make it successful. However I am glad they are back and functioning, it provides a major part of my socialising while I am doing my PhD.

After a tough week

2012-01-15T12:17:00.000-08:00

Well Monday on the whole was a good sort of day, work wise I think I was reasonably paced and managed to get through a fair bit of stuff. Also my writers group had a social at the The Three Tuns which is apparently haunted not that any of the writers group reported anything odd, but it may go some way to explain the small number of drinkers in the evening. Margaret one of the group who is great at doing Gothic style stories would have had a field day with that. It was in the evening a bit away from most of the social life spots in Sheffield at night, not that any of them seemed to be active. It met the requirements of atmosphere without loud music but the wine was not up to much. However it was a good evening.

Tuesday the first of the disaster came to light. I had messed up I got to giving the course I was due to and then realised that I was due to give another on Thursday which I had managed to loose from my diary. Normally in these situations I would move everything else around, but Thursday I had my supervision in Birmingham booked, the only thing in a week that happens regularly that trumps giving a course. Drat, drat, drat. So it had to be cancelled. I feel slightly better in that we have managed to replace it with two courses in a smaller room, which means that it involves more effort on my part. It also looks good for people who are having to rebook in that they now have two dates to choose from. So more choice this way but I dislike doing it. I also made the mistake of deciding to be nice to students and let the work on spare machines expecting about a dozen out of the sixteen names to turn up, fifteen turned up and it meant the class was crammed and the students were noisy. Going down to Waitrose on the evening I found out Neil had been denied his flat because he would not give up the dog he rescued eight months ago. If he had had the dog for over two years it would have been fine. That dog is better looked after than Neil is.

Wednesday I went down with a cold, I find that if I hit a cold quick and hard it seems to become much less trouble in its symptoms. So I took the day off, spent extra time resting, vitamin C with zinc and echinacea and also had eucalyptus and tea tree essential oils in the atmosphere. The result was that the cold was largely asymptomatic by Thursday but with not being in work I got further behind than I was.

Thursday was a supervision day, the main symptom as far as the cold was concerned was that I had lost my appetite, however I was in a strange mood, I can’t quite put my finger on it, if anything I was functioning a bit higher level than usual, not spectacular but I seemed to be able to judge times better, I was not panicking about so much and I seemed to know what I wanted to do and just able to do that. The supervision went well on the whole, I have a lot of work to do in the next six weeks and partly it is writing another piece for my methodology that outlines why I chose that approach. I also need to go through and deal with how the discipline of working in my methodology differs from what would be done if I considered another methodology in particular if I had considered mixed methods, empirical research. I actually did consider it, way back, long long ago, but the more I explored qualitative methods the more I considered that the discursive ethnography was going to be more appropriate. Basically the topic was not ready for empirical approach yet. I am involved in empirical methods through work it is just I could not find the cohesive understanding that I think is necessary to use that approach.

Friday, well I made it to breakfast, which had around 35 people there. Apparently the Lord Mayor had had breakfast at the Archer Project either this week or the week before and it was thought that might explain the drop in numbers. It is odd how we seem to have high numbers when the Archer project is closed or having difficulties and low numbers when they have something special on and yet our regulars never seem to change dramatically. Sometimes one will disappear for a few weeks, and sometimes we loose one through illness or other circumstance but they seem to come pretty reliably. I went home and did some writing before going into work so only taking about half the morning of my working at home day, I realised I had quite a bit to do in work. So I went in. At 2pm I went to meet someone to talk about a project that was on the go and came back at 3pm to find that the top management of the department had put out a list of where people are going to be in the new offices. The moving to offices is moving us out of rented buildings and into University owned buildings. Up until fairly recently it was assumed by all that I would be going into a single room, but the exec decided nobody but themselves would be in single rooms. They were warned that they had to see me before they announced this. They did not. Now as far as single rooms go, I have never demanded one personally, others have said it was necessary for me. So I am not going to be dogmatic about it although a single office is really the only sensible way to do my job. However they did not check I was happy with the people they put me with. I am not, one of them has crossed personal boundaries with me, and while I do not mind working with him as a colleague he is fine, I do NOT want to be in a room on my own with him. It is a three person office and I can’t see how with it being that number such times can be avoided. My reaction is so strong that I do not feel able to cooperate with the current proposal.

Fortunately I had meal out with the Dicksons on the evening. It was really a big deal being with people who I knew I could be less than fine with and they would understand. It is funny the upset has left me feeling physically cold a lot of time and wanting to be with people but at the same time knowing I cannot really cope people who want me to respond to them. There is the need for space that is supportive.

Saturday, was a sort out day, I had to spend sometime in the morning. Unfortunately someone had sent me a letter with the wrong postage on and I forgot to take it to the sorting office. I might see if I can sort it at some other way during the week. I also put together a document that stated what my preferences were with respect to room and sent that to my boss and her superior. Then I went into town and managed to find a very thin brown scarf that although very wide fills in round my neck nicely and Blacks had an ALS beanie hat going for £5 (previously £15). I happen to find most ALS clothing very comfortable to wear although they tend to be very casual. I am not sure why they are so comfortable, initially I thought natural fibres but since then I have had stuff from them that is definitely man-made fibre. When I got home I did the writing up for the week on my thesis. The whole writing process this week has felt like moving through thick mud.

Today I went to St Andrews. The congregation was I think sparser than usual but on the whole seem much as always. I ended up doing the final lock up because Jean and Sarah both had their hands full with the stuff that they were taking home. The stacking of chairs in the cupboard is problematic. Chairs should only be stacked six high, BUT the cupboard is such a size that unless the stacks are put in exactly right then you can not get all the chairs in if only stacked in sixes. I know I have unpacked and packed that cupboard several times in order to get chairs in correctly. If I had not known that they did fit I would have given up!

eventually getting around to chattering in the New Year

2012-01-08T12:11:00.000-08:00

Hope you are all had good times over the New Year and the return to normal work has not come as too much of a shock.

The journey up to Galloway was smooth although quite wet/foggy over Shap. I stopped at Tebay and then drove through to Newton Stewart. I am finding however that I am deliberately taking alternative routes when possible as the driving along major roads for hours at a time is tedious. Yes the A75 is a major road and you can’t let your concentration drop although the monotony of driving tempts you to (Motorways are worse). At least on country by-roads, although you still have to concentrate, there is not the same monotony, you are always responding to the road and circumstances. I therefore drove towards Caelaverock but as it started to rain on route I did not stop, I also went through the Wigtownshire Machars. I am never sure if this refers to the whole penisula or just to the North West part of it, Whithorn and Wigtown seem to stand as separate identities and yet also interact with it.

Actual time was quiet, the car must have been used to the drive from the Mull Village to Maryport and back. I did not even get into Stranraer. The trip I had half planned to PortPatrick did not happen due to weather and tiredness. It was too windy to risk taking pictures of lighthouses when I thought I might. The Mull Village is really no longer a village but a collection of houses en route from Drummore to the Mull, however I suspect that a hundred years ago it was precisely that. A functioning village with school and shop (the school building is still standing), however then Drummore would have been very close on the size of a small town. Today it functions as the equivalent of a street name but retains the title Village for convenience.

Most days I took the dog for a walk along with the girls. We actually did a set walk, along Maryport bay towards Drummore. Only on the Tuesday did Morag join us with her taking the dog. I can see why the dog prefers me to walk her. I will let her off the lead more readily than Morag (dog pace is not human) but I also keep verbal contact with her. By the end she knew she was not allowed on the beach unless there were a human part of the pack there, and she was not to get to far away. I also called her back and put her on the lead if other people and especially dogs approached, it helps that her eyes are covered in dog hair and therefore I tend to see them approach before she does.. She tends to get excited and I prefer to know that she is reasonably under control. I also suspect that dog understands us wanting to get into tight formation in the presence of another pack.

Morag is still enjoying the challenges of her job and I suspect hoping for a continuation of funding past the present contract terms. This of course is dependent on the Charity that employs her finding the money. Cait seems to be doing well although she clearly hero-worships me. Not sure that is totally a good thing because in part it is built on an unrealistic version of me, the one that appears at holiday times and has endless times for girls and dogs and so forth. The everyday me is far more like her mum, short of time, struggles to fit in what needs doing and often too tired to give real attention. Jenny seems to be doing well. There are comments on how good a cook she is, I suspect in part this is a survival technique as knowing how to cook is one thing Morag is quite clear that she does not know much about. She is actually developing into quite a beauty if in more historical form than is currently fashionable.

Travelling down on my last day, through what I think of as the fairy glen I surprised a hawk sheltering from the winds which promptly got flustered and dived into the bushes. From my description of it my father thinks it may have been a Red Kite. About the only things I could accurately tell about it was that it had squirrel red tale feathers and a medium size, it probably had whitish breast feathers.

The day before I came back and the days I travelled there were high winds. I was fortunately in a heavily laden Vauxhall Corsa, Corsa cars are traditionally styled pretty low (not so good for deeply rutted roads, but good for winds) and the winds did not cause me too much concern. None of the roads I wanted to travel on were blocked (might have been a bit difficult as I went A712/713 through Galloway rather than A75), I think I saw one tree blown down. The Rhins are traditionally windy places so when they heard of gust in Edinburgh around 100 miles an hour every ones actions was “so what are they here!”. When I looked at the forecast about 50 to 60 mph I would say, in other words considerably less than in Edinburgh. Indeed the extreme South West of Scotland seemed either to have been well adapted or relatively sheltered (thanks to Ireland?) compared with elsewhere. Perhaps a combination of the two.

Anyway I got the car back in on Thursday and have spent the last few days trying to sort out things before I go back to work. Friday was spent in a mix of shopping and revising work that had been proof read, Saturday preparing for supervision and getting the papers off. I also had to submit electronically this time. This should be interesting. My experience leads me to think that the initial few times this happens there will be hiccoughs in the system as both I and my supervisor get used to it. I suspect that the system is really for record and that we will need to continue our normal sending of actual papers to each other.

Today I woke and during prayers started getting migraine visual aura. If you can imagine something like the following picture but not static, rather it was as if the tiles were changing fairly fluidly, and was in an arc across my vision you will get an idea. So it was back to bed, then when I came around doing brainstorming for my next chapter of my thesis.

On the day after Christmas

2011-12-26T10:55:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-11T10:21:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-04T09:20:00.001-08:00

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.

Chattering on a foggy November day

2011-11-20T13:20:00.001-08:00

Thought I’d start with a bit of poetry well not mine and I did not have a camera at the ready to capture the texture of this morning so from John Clare:

"So dull and dark are the November days.

The lazy mist high up the evening curled,

And now the morn quite hides in smoke and haze;

The place we occupy seems all the world."

- John Clare, November

It gives a feel for what the feel and texture of the weather is like here at present.

Well Monday was the sort of work day where I could do with a bit better pacing. I had two heavy (i.e. energy consuming) meetings on the morning. The second of which was a meeting with the Doctoral Training Centre which delivers research training for Social Science doctoral students and early researchers about creating a core of material that people can use to become more proficient at using NVivo. The result is that I am going to try and record my course onto Echo 360 and try putting it up on the web so people can use it when they want. I don’t think this is particular special as NVivo already has a lot of tutorials up on line and that will be part of going further. In the evening went to writers group and took a poem about the safe from Hanover which was left discarded in the builders rubble. Don’t think it worked as well as last weeks but I am glad to have written it.

Actually Tuesday and Wednesday were relatively quiet days in work, time to catch up, review some of the training I have been too and sort out where to head next. I am hopefully going to get to look after a group of webpages, I just suspect I need to find out who is the departmental webmaster. Also spent some time on a project on nutritional information in Men’s Health Magazines. It is certainly shall we say interesting, although the last few weeks have been spent trying to weed out the useless categories (e.g. anyone know what cabbaggin is? No nor do we but we guess it comes from cabbage).

Thursday was busier, editing a paper in the morning and also spending the afternoon reviewing work. My boss is going to have to learn that it is no longer possible for her to assume that when she has a spare hour she can just book it with me. I have significant amount of time booked every week up to Christmas. Partly that is with teaching which starts the week after next .
Friday I managed Broomhall Breakfast, and stayed on after to help put away as Sarah had gone early and there weren’t many of the men hanging around. then went into town to do a weekends shop and finally sat down to write. I got a fair bit written but am conscious that I need to go back over part of what I have written to finesse it. It is writing about writing always somewhat tricky. Anyway I have just done a final go over it and sent it to my proof readers (thanks Ruth and James) . I was using pomodoro technique it does seem to work quite well for these writings up. I ended up with over 3,000 words this week, hmm. I think word count wise I will be able to take Christmas and New Year off, well maybe writing after New Year.

Yesterday I sat down and finally got all the interviews I had done at Herringthorpe and not sent copies out of, ready to send out. That was twelve different envelopes with CDs, forms and a covering letter plus a reply envelope. I had the bad habit of interviewing people for an hour and twenty five minutes and CDs only took an hour and twenty minutes so I was often having to split the interviews. I thought I was going to run out of CDs so ended up with a quick journey down town to buy CDs and labels for the envelopes. However the envelopes are filled and now just need posting (next Friday?)

I should have been at the study day for the Society for Liturgical studies but they were so badly organised that by the time I knew I was going other things had cropped up. The big problem with a study dayl in London is you have to book early to find reasonable priced accommodation nearby and I did not fancy an early train in and a late train out, especially as I had given my word to be a church meeting today (to deal with the technical equipment). However one of the organisers wanted to ask me about a paper I had written. Well one of his questions was fine, had I selected the church I wrote it about (yes and no) but the second was about my analysis method and that is part of the creativity in my thesis I had to give quite a thought out reply and also felt I needed to copy my supervisor in on it.

Today I went to St Andrews for worship this morning. It was Music Sunday and included one of the Middleton boys playing a piece called siesta on his guitar as well as the choir performing a couple of pieces. Stuart was reading a passage so I knew he was not working today. Church meeting was discussing Zero Intolerance/Radical Welcome . I am aware of many misgivings about the campaign, I also happen to think it is a good thing, not because of the stuff it does but because it says “We do evangelism”. I have a theory that as evangelism has had low profile on many of the denominational central bodies (it was seen as the duty of the local church and therefore not their business) it has been seen as not important by the local church, now with the centre clearly putting effort into it, local churches are perhaps going to raise it on their own agenda whether or not they participate in the actual campaign. Almost certainly I suspect in twenty years time we will look back at it as a crass first attempt, but hopefully we will have developed skills to actually make this sort of evangelism work for us. However I suspect most people are for it, in the same way most people are for motherhood and apple pie. However the “welcome” here intended is far more than a friendly handshake at the church door. It is in the end a commitment by the congregation to be open to change that is required if new people want to join. I am not saying new people should not change, but I am saying the change is not just one way. We, those already there, have to be prepared to change as well. That is deeper, much more difficult and I am afraid I suspect many in the church aren’t ready for it.

Lets be clear it is easy to tackle the headline issues that are open to discrimination, such as race or sexuality; you can talk about those and get an understanding by the congregation but difficulties such as coping with boisterous children in worship amongst a group of senior citizens, honouring different peoples cultural norms and creating an environment that supports those with chaotic life style whether due to working patterns, drug abuse or poverty is often more difficult and more challenging. The big problem for being welcoming may not be the settled gay couple with two jobs who enjoy classical music, but the young married couple with four kids who have a can of beer in the pushchair, go out for a quick fag during the sermon and use expletives in conversation or the older man with a drink problem who wets himself during a service (neither of these are not hypothetical, I have seen them in church and I have seen congregations struggle). The prejudices do not necessarily fall where we think they do.

Anyway during setting up the audio visual Sarah brought a long extension cable on a wind up reel but it was not winding. Fortunately I realised this before it was put in use. Mum and Dad’s church had a heater fuse because they used a cable while still wound. So we used others and I brought it home and unwound it and rewound it. As it now easily unwinds and winds again I think I will take it back to the church. Stuart came around later on, mainly I suspect because he rang the Dicksons and they were slightly abrupt with him and he wondered why. The answer was simply because he rang them immediately on them getting in from church meeting and it really was an inconvenient time. He really must learn not to take things so personally.

Chattering of the first week of winter

2011-11-13T10:10:00.001-08:00

Well by Monday evening there was a definite change in the weather, so much so that the heating was not warming the committee room through until the second half of writers group. I checked the temperature in the room and it was set fine and the heating was clearly on so I just presume it was time to warm up. There were more there this week than last although not a full house yet. We will be very squashed in that room if we ever do get a full house as we are carrying a member over our quota, she is unlikely to actually come again this term as she has had major brain surgery.

Work wise a lot of what I have been dealing with has been at the design stage, although I must admit that some of it is due to argument about an analysis and wanted to claim I had done the wrong power calculation so I went back and did it for the way the person wanted to analyse it and got the same result. I suspected that it would, I wish some statisticians knew better how data behaves and understood that if an approximation gave one result it was quite likely that a more formal analysis would concur. I also heard this week that one of the outline research bids that I am involved in has had the go ahead to submit a detailed proposal.

Tuesday I went home for lunch realised I had a headache so took a pain killer and then went quickly to shop at Tescos for essentials before going back in. Hoping that it was just a headache. Needless to say the person I saw that afternoon had to put up with me in the throws of a migraine. It was not the pain that annoyed me, the painkiller took care of that, it was that my brain would slam on the emergency breaks half way through going down a particular line of enquiry. Anyway I did the meeting then headed home. I also sent apologies for the next day, knowing me I could possible have made the meeting in Preston but I would have been functioning as if I had a semi-migraine and then would have had to have had a proper one the next day when I had a training and another meeting.

The training was actually pretty useful and it was not the style of training I tend to prefer. What I like to have is a training which gives me something to think over and apply, while this one was very much a how to sort of training. It was called Networking for Women and the trainer was prepared to do the basics, such as give you ways to open conversations, telling you how to rephrase what you do and reminding us that networking is about finding out information, not really about giving it and certainly not about doing deals. Deals are done later on follow up of over coffee. It was good because it was so practical.

On the evening I went down to Waitrose to do a small shop although most of the shop for the weeken was being delivered by Tescos the next day. On going through the subway Neil the guy who is often there begging was there again. For those who are not familiar with Neil’s story he is ex-army and homeless, he mainly begs for the money to pay for his accommodation for the night as far as I can tell. He has been in hospital twice this year and I suspect with illnesses related to being homeless. He smokes but he is not a drinker (I am pretty sure of this now) and has taken ownership of an abused dog. This time he had a friend with him called Chris. Chris is fairly new to being on the streets of Sheffield, he is probably an alcoholic and certainly has mental health problems. According to Neil (Chris was that scared of me he could not talk to me) Chris was staying with the Occupy Sheffield Protest and sleeping in some of their accommodation. Neil was basically directing him towards Archer project and someone from the protest was trying to organise him into seeing a doctor. The fact was Neil who has next to nothing was helping someone who had even less. The good news was that Neil looked as if he might have an offer accepted on a council flat.

This weekend has been spent mainly on thesis. I have proof read my paper, it still needs some smoothing but I think it is in a state to send to my supervisor. I heard during the week that it had been accepted. I know I was expecting that as it was in line with the conference theme, a lot of PhD students in my opinion have a single talk which is basically “this is my thesis” which they wheel out on numerous occasions. That is not my approach and never has been. That meant that the paper I submitted was likely to be more on topic than quite a few papers. It also meant that I find it easier to stay to the time limit. My thesis is too big and unwieldy to be presented in twenty minutes. I also have decided not to do a Powerpoint and concentrate on familarising myself with the text. I can do this there are enough changes in tone and pace in the twenty minutes for it not to be difficult to keep interest. A review of how the writing up process is going is on this post in my thesis blog

Last night there when I went to bed there was lots of flashing lights from Ambulances and police cars on Hanover Way with the whole of anti-clockwise lane of traffic sealed off. The news this morning said that there had been a person killed on the pedestrian crossing. It is not the first time this has happened, I can recall at least two other occasions of people being hit by vehicles there, and one of the times was a youth worker at Hanover Methodist. I am not sure how it is going to play locally.

Today i may have made a bit of breakthrough with the editing and going from initial writing to first draft (I know normally first draft is normally the initial but for me the initial writing is done using a series of short periods (half hours) where I just try and write as much as possible. It is a good way to get ideas out of my head and onto the page. First draft is what I do at the weekend with those pages, where I read, type in and do a lot of the pulling in of references and rephrasing. This is an adaptation of the method proposed by Robert Boice in his book “Professors as Writers” he calls the intense fast getting ideas down generative writing. However I was finding then that the getting from that to a basic text was taking forever as I would keep getting distracted. So I decided to take a look at Pomodoro Technique as suggested by the Thesis Whisperer . It got me through the last half of editing a second draft of part of my thesis quickly. I really must try and see if it will mean I spend less time getting a second draft next weekend and therefore more time with the books that feed the writing process. or doing the administrative side such as sending out recordings of interviews.

Now the cherry tree has lost its final leaves

2011-11-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

I noticed this week that the last leaves have fallen from the cherry tree and today even the sun had a chill to it.

This week has been slightly less hectic although I was writing the paper. Monday I spent some time being interviewed by a colleague at work because he discovered that he did not quite know what I did. I decided to describe myself as a research whisperer. That is not that I am the researcher, but often when a researcher gets into difficulties, particularly with the analysis stage, I am able to provide them with the know-how to get them over them. Actually I do everything from help prepare research bids to reviewing comments by reviewers and deciding on best method of approach. However the skills I am employed for is the ones that involve using analysis software.

Meanwhile Dad was over in Sheffield with Mum for Doug Thackers funeral. I describe Doug as Dad’s best friend, he was one of the few people Dad made the effort to keep in contact with over the years. This is not me being rude about Uncle Jack, Dad’s relationship to Uncle Jack is far closer to that of brothers than best buddies including the ability to wind each other up totally! Nor is this a reflection on how Doug held Dad, although I know Doug appreciated the fact that Dad when he was there listened as Doug could talk. The funeral was very clearly designed by Doug and Leslie Green (another old friend of Doug’s). Though Doug’s Christian life was mentioned there was no mention of either family or of Doug’s achievements and I think Dad felt that it was a good funeral.

On the evening was writers group, it was good to be meeting again and to be concentrating on writing. Unfortunately there were only six of us there and I had brought the shortest poem I had. This meant they had fifteen per word to analyse it! I think I will take a longer piece this week.They keep teasing me about putting together a collection, I think largely because my poems are often on the short side. The big problem with this is I don’t know how to select those which are good and those that aren’t.

Tuesday was fairly quiet, well I had a review of a bid to the Nuffield foundation prepared by one of the brightest students in last years human nutrition programme. The aim is to get enough money so she can be employed to do the work. She is bright, hard working and a very good researcher so I hope it comes off. The project is also interesting as she is looking at choice in school dinners. After all there is no point in the world in providing kids with superb meals if they are going to choose pizza instead and in Secondary School they can often do just that.

Wednesday should have been busy, spent the morning editing and paper, then prayer meeting at St Andrews and then I was back to meet someone who is the most incompetent researcher I have ever come across. Well he had a cold so did not make it. I think I was grateful. So I spent the afternoon going through a paper looking for places where it related to policy, this was not difficult, it was all there and required minimal editing to bring out the nuances that were hidden in the text. Sometimes it just takes a fresh pair of eyes to create new enthusiasm for a piece of research.

Thursday was training on the morning. I am afraid that I suspect the solution to my tendency to prefer to do things that seem safe in my office rather than go out and get things done with other people is to rather get out and do it. I am competent and able to do it, I know that because when I do, I tend to succeed at what I do, but for some reason that never builds into wanting to do it more. Actually it sounds as if I better get on with working through Ask for it. Their other book “Why Women don’t Ask” started a noticeable change in attitude and I suspect this will help further. The afternoon was spent devising coding schemes or at least helping somebody to. This is one of the few times I have been through the whole process.

Friday, I was woken by time of the month cramps so rather than go to Broomhall Breakfast I took pain killers and got a hot water bottle and went back to bed. Fortunately by 11:30 a.m. I was up and ready to type up the paper I had written in the morning slots. I was being very strict with myself over word limit and it is about 1850 words long, I now have to consider if I put in the bit I dropped from the beginning which is about the standing of theologians within the Reformed tradition (ambivalent at best). It strengthens the conclusion but is a bit tangential to the rest of the paper.

On the evening I went around to the Dickson’s for dinner. James is a bit the worst for wear having had another arm injury and has not been great the last few weeks. Jean says he has not been doing much but I know from her response he is still doing things she wishes he wouldn’t. They seem to be enjoying Rosie and the boys living in Sheffield and were pleased with the milk and gluten free biscuits because Alex had told Jean off for not having biscuits for him during the week!

Saturday saw a quick trip into town and then me trying to spend the rest of the day reading, unfortunately I was just out of sorts, I presume due to time of the month. Anyway I managed to settled down to read. Oh I spent more time on Belden C. Lane’s book “Ravished by Beauty” . It is a very useful book to think with. I am not sure that it informs me as much as other books on spirituality but it is very interesting what he does. Firstly he does not treat the Reformed tradition spirituality as above reproach, he takes seriously the times it has gone wrong and done harm (he is looking a ecological spirituality). He however is very good on the positives and is making an interesting case for the centrality of desire for God within the Reformed tradition and that without it or with it wrongly directed the Reformed tradition becomes a dead weight. He also highlights the tension between the immanence of God and the transcendence and that if we get them out of balance we get into trouble. In this bringing of the emotions into the central area of what has often been seen as an over intellectualised set of rules he is challenging.

Today I went to worship, it was Shirley Knibbs preaching and I am sure Dad would have approved, even might have been tempted to mutter a quiet amen under his breath in the hope that nobody heard him. However she caused consternation by choosing an Old Testament reading from the Wisdom of Solomon. Ian Cooke spotted it first and came across to see David Hill about not being able to find the reading in the Bible. So they set about trying to find a Bible in the church with an apocrypha in it. They failed so I went home and got one, just in case Shirley did not decide to read it herself (she did). Eventually it turned out there was one in the Bible that is normally placed on the lecturn, which is a large print one I bought for evening service years ago but is the one large Bible that is in a modern translation in the church. She talked in the introduction about having oil for our lamps and brought an oil lamp to show us. She said if she had been organised she would have had the oil and would have lit it. I immediately thought “not in St Andrews, not unless you told the elders first, or you will have at least one elder leaving church to get a bucket of water”.

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

2011-10-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-09T13:15:00.000-07:00

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.

Out of placement

2011-09-18T13:17:00.001-07:00

Thesis Fractal Triskele, a photo by jengie@btinternet.com on Flickr.

For those who are interested in the mandala I was talking about last week, I now have an outline which you can see with this post , I am hoping to fill it with little balls of tissue paper representing every fifty words written, the balls will need to be quite small to cope with the complexity of the design. If I also manage to put up photos every week then it gives people an idea of how I am doing. That is the plan anyway. How I deal with the final editing and those sort of things is anyone’s guess. Actually the big first hurdle is to start to have an outline of my first chapter so that I can really begin writing. I also need to have a todo list so I get through all the stages.

For those interested in my placement church it looks as is St Andrews Chesterfield have someone preaching with a view at the end of next month. No idea who and am not going to make inquiries, I am just praying that they make the right decision about whether to issue a call or not.

Otherwise this week has been one of slowing down from the quite frenetic pace of previous weeks. Monday was the last day at the frantic pace although next Tuesday looks as if it will have it as well. So it has been slowing. There has also been a lot of last things. Tuesday we finished off drafting a paper for a masters thesis. To get a masters project from the level of a masters project and actually get it to submission level for a paper is a lot of hard work. It involves the supervisor in a lot more hands on approach and I have been involved with two this summer and probably have another one or two to do.

On Tuesday evening I went to church meeting at Herringthorpe. It was held in the church (some evening church meetings have been held in the Clynes Hall. They have just finished renovating the Clynes Hall so I was half expecting it to be there, but with the starting time it was felt that it would be better in the church itself. I had on the Monday sent through to Pauline and Tom the report to elders. Well I was not expecting anything to be mentioned about it at church meeting. After all normal policy would be for elders to digest then bring anything they thought essential to church meeting. Well Pauline mentioned that I had done it, mentioned that it was thirteen pages long (approximately 7.500 words), said it was well written (so obviously I was not going over Pauline’s head anyway) and offered any member that wanted it access to a copy. She had printed five copies out and was willing to email copies as well, the elders were instructed not to take a copy as they would get one automatically. All five copies went and there was a fair demand to have copies by email as well.

Wednesday I actually had nothing on, so I spent it trying to find all the bits and pieces I had dropped while I was frantically busy. Thursday was my birthday, it was noticeable that this year I got more good wishes via Facebook than I did birthday cards. The day was quiet and normal although a couple of books I ordered from Amazon had come. This ups the number of academic books on Reformed Spirituality from three to four and the other which appears to be an emerging church book both seems to be tackling the issue I am tackling with in a broader setting and is from a Reformed perspective. They should both be interesting. Anyone wanting details please just email me.

Friday I did my last session on the Breakfast as server. It has seen them over the summer but they really need to now move towards a more secure volunteer staffing than I can provide long term and when I am back from holiday I need to be writing and the breakfast made a pace for fridays that was distinctly different and not really compatible with writing although it did tend to clear my Saturdays nicely.

On the evening we went to Orient Express on West Street. It is very Chinese, even the bill comes in Chinese so I hope I paid the right amount (it was less than I expected and we weren’t intentionally stinting ourselves although they could not cope with giving us two scoops of the same flavoured sorbet so we ended up with two desserts instead of three, but I did take the highest price I could see on the slip). The food was pleasant and well cooked and the majority of diners were of oriental extraction. The only snag was that the sound seemed to echo around the building.

Saturday I spent largely doing bits and pieces and today was my last trip out to Herringthorpe. So I am now officially out of placement. It feels strange at present and a definite sign of moving on. They gave me three cards, what is funny is that a couple of families have managed to sign the cards two or three times! I suspect there is going to be some come back from the report and such but I will have to wait for that.

On the last lap of placement

2011-09-11T12:42:00.001-07:00

Right this week has been a week of two halves with an evening out between the two of them. The first part of the week was dominated by the need to produce a report by next Monday, the problem as always is sorting out the data. Once the data was sorted the results wanted were so prescriptive that it was a matter of filling in the holes. However that always takes longer than you think and we did not start filling the holes to the second session. We also managed to make good progress with an article. That being said, I still ended up very drained each day.

One thing that did come through is that I needed a method for making progress on my thesis visible to me. I worked out that if I can write 400 words for 5 days a week then in 40 weeks I will have written 80,000 or my full thesis. Well that is the theory anyway. Let me first put a number of caveats around that. First writing this way means that I need to plan each chapter in great depth before starting to write it. Second, the four hundred words are first draft, a lot of the referencing and checking will be done on the second draft. Finally I know there is a lot of reading, exploring and such that has to go on concurrently with the writing. The first task is therefore to plan in detail most of the methods chapter. However this week I have been having fun, creating a mandala for me to fill with coloured balls or rolled tissue paper. I am creating a Triskele but am using a Pythagoras tree (scroll down for actual one used) which is proving fascinating to draw out but unlike the original triskele the arms interlock.

By Wednesday I was looking forward to the writers group social. In many ways writers is the group that I socialise with these days. We are on the hunt for a bug without loud music but with atmosphere in Sheffield. I think we have fairly conclusively established that such a pub does not exist in the Devonshire Quarter. However the talk was good in the first part of the evening and the company was pleasant. I must really bring something in for Christmas time as I find I never end up buying drinks at these evenings.

Thursday I did my final interview for my thesis. It feels strange to be wrapping things up after so long, it will feel even stranger I am sure when I sit down to write after the holiday. The interview went well and it is interesting to listen to what Pauline had to say. In many ways I suspect she has a very good idea how the congregation ticks. The comment by her that she would change nothing personally but that there would be change while she was there, I think shows a shrewd approach to the congregation. I think what she has probably done successfully is to persuade the congregation that doing things differently isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed there probably see it as in some ways a good things but are not too sure on the principals that should guide that change. This leads to a conservatism as they have to battle issues out.. They seem to be looking seriously at taking over the pre-school group that uses their premises (its current management are retiring). At times I could see myself in Pauline. In her tendency to see a job and therefore go and tackle it; including the feeling guilty if I can’t.

Friday I served breakfast again. We served 47 or so, but at the start we were really slow having barely double figures in the door when we opened. One of the breakfasters, comes with his bike, helps set out tables, has cereal and coffee and then goes down to Waitrose for 8:00 a.m. to sell the Big Issue. Needless to say the helpers at Breakfast who see him there always stop to buy a copy. I did put my alarm on, it is a sunrise alarm (see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lumie-Bodyclock-CLASSIC-Wake-up-Light/dp/B0049AHZSM/ref=sr_1_5?s=drugstore&ie=UTF8&qid=1315763031&sr=1-5 ) and I got it while I was really battling with depression as it enabled me to get up. I did only wake once during the night so perhaps it was an improvement although I still started to wake before it started lighting as I heard it click on.

Afterwards I went to collect a prescription, I went to get it and when the second pharmacist was handing it over I showed my pre-payment card for the second time. Only he commented on it being out of date. Panic! Since I have found myself very good at not changing cards over (not just prepayment presciption cards, but membership cards , credit cards and the like) I have made the rule to immediately put them in my purse.when I receive them. So where was it, had I forgotten to pay. I decided to check my paper piles before I contacted anyone. In the one by the door, where my cleaner normally puts the post, I found it in an unopened envelope.! Obviously had arrived a day my cleaner was in and she had put it there, while I forgot to check the pile when I came in.

Saturday I went household shopping on the morning then finished the report on Herringthorpe.,The finishing of the report meant going through it at least twice. One to take account of Ruth’s proof editing and one to combine it with the fair copy from James. It is done and sent..It also decided to get warm again after being quite autumnal earlier in the week although it pelted down in the evening. The fact that the sun was shinning through the rain created quite a spectacular view out of the window, so much so that I did not go and look for rainbows that would have been out the other side of the house.

Today went to Herringthorpe, only one church meeting and one Sunday to go. Also I got stopped by two students of oriental extraction who were asking where they could get food, clothes and computers. From where they were I presume they were new overseas student at Sheffield University and they had simply come with a minimal amount. The girl did not seem to have the sort of clothes she really needed even for today which was a mild autumn day. This was at 9:50 in the morning. I just hope some of the shops open at 10:00 a.m. and they did not have to wait until 10:30. There was a panic at Herringthorpe today. by 10:15 the carpark was full and people were parking in the overflow car park. This was partly as there was a baptism and the church seemed fairly full when I got in. Then at 10:20 a coach turned up with more members of the baptismal party. There was a hasty opening of doors so as to allow for extra chairs. The Baptismal party was large I would say about sixty people. There were no less than eight god-parents. I think this says something of the parents.

Keeping the pace going over the late August Bank holiday

2011-09-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

Right I am trying to remember what happened this last week, certainly it was not eventful as the previous one. Monday was spent writing the final report to the elders at Herringthorpe. I learn a lot about myself in so doing as I found it very easy to write lots of words and I know there are more words just waiting to get out. I think if I was designing my study again I would shorten slightly my time with the two congregations so as to have a space to recuperate between them. I find that in getting to know and understand a congregation for two years I also develop a love for them and the ending, uprooting of yourself afterwards is actually quite painful. Rushing into the next situation as I have designed my doctorate, is not a good idea. You need time to sort assess and get your bearings afterwards.

Tuesday I was in work, Derek Collins had asked about lights on at the sound desk so Cliff kindly came down and changed the bulbs. This was not a simple tasks as the bulbs needed soldering into position. A more modern desk would just use LEDs that last forever rather than small filament bulbs. I am well aware that when I get back I am going to have to start trying things like placing microphones for the choir and see how we get on. The initial stages will be messy and it will have to be done on weeks when I am there not weeks when I am writing. Then in the end it may not work or it might only be possible for the transmitted part (that would actually mean rewiring the speaker to the creche so it takes its feed from the loop or other output and not from that to the speakers. I also suspect that I should look again at recording services. Then long term there is planning for what happens when the radio microphones give out. They must be about a decade old.

Wednesday was the day that I had to sit down and write up an analysis I was doing for the department. The due date was 1st September, when I took it on I assumed I would be normally busy and that it would be relatively simple. The analysis was relatively simple but it took me a long time to prepare the data for analysing (first I had to go through and label everything, secondly I then had to calculate the variables we actually wanted, which were not the same as the variables that were there in the original data set) and then I had work through the actual presentation of the data. One of those days where the sheer absorption in the analysis is draining. I got most of the points covered and I suspect the request for more analysis is that it is making sense to other people now. The previous person did not understand that you had to give your audience a framework within which to interpret it. It meant that a number of my results looked substantially different from hers simply because I kept the base the same in graphs. So I reported estimated percentage of all students while she was reporting percentage of people who owned ipads next to percentage of people who owed laptop PCs.

Thursday got the nicest rejection letter ever for a paper sent to a journal. The response was basically “This should be published unfortunately it is not in our brief”. Also was proofing another paper., totally different subject. I am finding it odd to do this, I am not by a long way the most pedantic of grammarians as James and Ruth can vouch for. Actually although I keep trying to do better I was in the wrong generation at school, the one where they thought it all came naturally and did not need teaching. Hence I have bits but not nearly as much as I should have. This is not helped by the fact that I am a relatively late developer with writing style. I still at writers group often find it difficult to critique others writing.

Friday was the breakfast and we were down with 45 there, but this was a good number, more and we really are exhausted by the end of breakfast. The thing is numerical growth is not what we are aiming at with the breakfast. What we want is to develop is more a sense of community and relationship between those who come. One of our regular breakfasters is starting his masters (I think its his third or fourth) in sports chaplaincy. He has been appointed one of the sports chaplains in Sheffield at least in part due to the immense amount of volunteering he does at sports events. However after breakfast I go back and sleep. On a sadder note Matthew, a ltwenty year old who through most of his childhood been fostered by a local couple, collapsed shortly after the couple returned from holiday and certainly by friday had not regained consciousness. I have not sussed how to deal with my body and breakfast. My major problem is my body insists on checking every two hours during the night whether it is 6 a.m. yet. No chance of me oversleeping but by the end of breakfast I am tired. Oh I don’t think my body would cope with an alarm, it would just keep waking me every couple of hours to check how long it was before the alarm goes off.

Saturday my parents came over. Well I read a paper before they came over from a Presbyterian minister in Bloemfontein. Actually there seems to be a group of ministers doing fairly sensible Congregational Studies in South Africa although they are minister focused and therefore tend to be more managerial/action research. Working as a lay person I actually have more time to gather information but less ability to implement actions. Anyway I got it read and a couple more in store for reading on Mendeley. We went down to Waitrose to shop. Amongst the items was a new ironing board cover for me (I wanted to pick mum’s brain on putting it onto the board but my old cover had persihed) and also I needed to get a new toaster. My old one had started shorting the fuse every time I put it on and before it made toast. Fortunately Waitrose were having a bit of a sale of household goods so I got a £25 one for £17. We also bought lunch which was the real purpose and Dad boughts some coffee beans with the caffeine still in them. For lunch I got hold of same ham filled pasta, some guacamole and a a salad. I cooked the pasta and then stirred in the guacamole rather than use a sauce. It worked pretty well. I also bought the ingredients and mum made up a fruit salad. I forgot to get a fizzy drink for the syrup so had to make it from raw ingredients.

Today I went to Herringthorpe, a poorer than usual turn out possibly doe to the weather,but families often don’t ocme on communion sunday. Next week they have the dedication of the refurbishment of the Clines Hall and a gift day. I am trying to decide if I am going to their coffee morning for charities on the Saturday or if I am having a quiet day in, perhaps reading.

Visit to National Media Museum and a Hectic Breakfast

2011-08-29T03:44:00.000-07:00

Right it will be highlights this time rather than a day by day account. Work was still busy and students were still panicking but really other than that there is no big news from most of it although for the first time ever on Monday I had to shut up the building, which required me ringing security for them to lock it as I do not know the code.

Tuesday I went to Bradford to the National Media Museum with Cathy,Sam and Hannah. The trains worked really well, I have a double train from Sheffield, while Cathy, Sam and Hannah have a single one from Rochdale. Cathy had used Red Spotted Hanky and got the fares for the three of them for about £15.00, As my fare from Sheffield cost about that much as well, I reckon she did pretty well. However not all routes are as good, there is no saving for me going to University of Birmingham, I have just checked. The centre is an easy fifteen minute walk from the Interchange Station. We got in and had a coffee, while we made plans. Cathy found a trail with questions for children, but we also decided to see Hubble 3D which tells of a mission by the space shuttle crew to repair and improved the Hubble Telescope. Sam was worried about this as it was an afternoon showing but when we pointed out that they would still have about an hour and a half to go before they needed to catch the planned train he was quite happy. Hannah was carrying a pack to see how well she did, if she managed it the prize was being able to take more toys on holiday. We went around the galleries in the morning, spent quite a bit of time looking for a story board for Bob the Builder. We overlooked it because it was not in colour, even though there was a video of the episode right next door to it. Then we went to have lunch in the picnic room. I had packed a picnic sticking pretty close to Hannah’s suggestions. Hannah had a good go on cheese sticks and Sam ate nine mini Pepperami. No I was not counting, there were ten in the packet, Hannah ate two thirds of one and Cathy the rest, but I took none home. Actually most of the food went. Hannah took one sandwich to eat on the way home and I took home a yoghurt and a couple of peaches. Sam was amazed when he said he would have a nectarine if we had a knife, and I said “who says I have not got a knife” and proceeded to get out my tool kit and take out the pen knife. I am not sure what he thought I carried in my handbag, but a tool kit wasn’t it.

Hubble 3D worked really well. Sam is saying at present he wants to be an astrophysicist (before I forget Cathy it might be worth telling Sam that Astronauts tend to be really fit Astrophysicists, admittedly we have just come to the end of a generation of space mission and we don’t know what is next but I will be very surprised if there isn’t something).. Therefore Sam thoroughly enjoyed the film including the pictures of stars as well as the story about the space walk. Hannah was wowwed by the experience of Imax but after half an hour she was bored with the film (I suspect she would have been bored by any film, Hannah is a busy person and likes to do several things at once). I was impressed with the pictures, unfortunately the sound was slightly out of sync and it was like having someone continually whispering behind me. Afterwards we came down and had another drink, after Hannah and Sam had finished theirs (far quicker than Cath or I) I gave them their packs for home which included £5 to spend in the gift shop. They raced off with it, which gave Cath and I ten minutes to talk, as Cathy could watch them from where we were seated. Cathy had asked whether I had heard of the postcard app on my phone. I said that I thought I had it there, so we looked and not only did I have it, but I also had a free postcard from them, so Sam and Hannah posed, while I took a photo and then Sam typed in the text on the back, and we sent it to Mum and Dad. Time was getting on so we headed to the station. We got the trains safely back, for the first time ever I managed to get by chance the cross country train from Leeds to Sheffield so got in earlier than expected.

Wednesday was an away day, it was partly a get to know the team session and partly a chance for the people in charge to pick peoples brains. Two things surprised me. First on our table I was second longest serving member (alright so the other person had been with the department for over a decade longer than me and the next nearest person was only a year or two behind but still). The second was how surprised people were that I did not have a TV. I suspect when you own a TV you think everyone does, but when you don’t you pick up people who like you don’t. I would be suspicious that there is at least one other person without a TV in the team (which is large) if not more.

However the real fun and games started on Wednesday evening. Mary (who helps at breakfast) had tried to take the food for Friday around to the church when she had been bitten by something and seems to have had quite a severe reaction to it. Anyway she was having difficulty standing and did not make it to the church but went home. Also David Price who was supposed to be helping found he needed to do something else on Friday morning. So it looked like Broomhall Breakfast was going to be Roy and Fleur and me. As I have very few breakfast associated numbers. I think Jean Dicksons mobile phone number was the best I had, I was not being very useful. All I really could do was say to God “you sort it”.

I got a second call from Mary on Thursday as David although not able to come on Friday had offered to take the shopping around to the church for her but she was not getting a response when she rang his number. She wanted to know if I had a more up to date number. I said no but suggested that she rang St Marks. Why I had not thought of that before I do not know. Anyway she must have got in contact with David because he did the bulk of taking things around to the church and there were only a couple of things she had forgotten.

Anyway Friday came and Stuart who cooks often came as did Ollie so although perhaps lower staffed than we would have liked, were very efficiently staffed. Not only that but one of our regulars who help set up the chairs brought a bunch of flowers so at the end I sent the flowers round with Ollie to Mary. We served fifty all told although the list only has forty eight, Stuart and Roy had breakfasts but are not listed. We ran out of almost everything, though I went down to Spar to buy enough to keep us going to the end. Roy and Beryl decided to ask me .

Today I went to morning worship at Herringthorpe and conducted the interview with the current church secretary, it was perhaps the shortest interview I have done but it certainly was not uninformative. I am still trying to think through what was going on though I have written up a report. On the surface it looks like someone who is busy fitting me into a tight schedule but there is something deeper going on, in many ways I felt as if I was working through a minefield and as much for my own sake as for his I needed to keep pretty strictly to the path. He displayed a much deeper emotional attachment to the congregation than any I have seen, and I have seen some strong ones.

A day late, last week was so busy!

2011-08-22T05:41:00.000-07:00

Actually at least Sunday was, I got this written late last night but have not had chance to post it until now.

I am trying to think back to Monday and it seems a long way away now and having checked my diary nothing too eventful happened which is probably as well. Tuesday I had a day and a half of life, the first part of the morning was spent preparing a bid to the Leverhulme Foundation for a major research project involving human nutrition and computer science, trying to use computer models of language to understand what messages are going out about nutrition over the web. Then onto a talk with someone from the URC who wanted to consult me about a survey. Then Stuart came round of the evening, the first time since I stopped him coming around for a chat on a Friday night. He had managed to break the shower in his house, while drunk and wondered if he could have a shower.

My body had had enough excitement for the time being and decided a migraine was the only way to stop me from having more. Fortunately for once it decided to be unambiguous and I had classic migraine symptoms right from the start.This time I actually understood I had a classical migraine headache, other times I have only realised that that is what is going on when I find myself totally unable to think straight enough to get up.

Thursday was a quieter day with just spending the afternoon sorting out a paper. In the morning I discovered Mendeley which I think is really something. It gives me about ninety percent of what I have been looking for in citation software. That is it allows me to handle pdf copies of papers, make notes on them electronically and cite them. It also imported my Endnote citation database. Now all it really needs is a proper classification tool that allows me to make notes on a paper and then classify it to a category, so that then I can look at the category, see the where the notes link to and build the argument from that. I have been playing with it and so far am impressed. I am wondering about the social networking side of it, it might be useful for one other of my supervisors students especially if it would allow us to share useful papers to both of us.

Friday was the breakfast and we had forty-eight to dine. Ollie who often helps out was down again and he said that the University rag had been asking him if he knew of anyone requiring funding. So I suggested he might put in a bid for the food for several weeks. By talking to Mary and such we came up with a suggesting that perhaps £600 would pay for three months food. In some ways we would like to reach out further to the University. But the couple who were cooking caught onto this conversation and suggested that they also brought the breakfast in front of St Mark’s PCC as a possible local charity for the church to support. I then went on and shopped at Waitrose having not got on Wednesday. On the evening Stuart came around for another shower and to borrow the keys for church so he could do the photocopying for the next two weeks. The really good news was that his Doctor had told him that he needed to stop drinking and he seemed if anything relieved about this. Also Judith had volunteered to do the photocopying for him and he had instead said no and was going to do it himself. As he did not come around yesterday evening for help I suspect he has got his head around it.

Yesterday I kept quiet, I went to town and got a few things, then came back and did some work on the report to Herringthorpe. This is the indepth report to elders. I am not sure how much to put in on my thoughts and am still working my way through that.

Today had morning worship at Herringthorpe, then came home, ate lunch and went back to help set out chairs for an Ecumenical Songs of Praise. One of the surprises at the Songs of Praise was that Karen who was chaplaincy assistance a good while back is now the local vicar. So had a chat with her. Then came home.

Trip to Birmingham for HPC workshop in the midst of a busy week

2011-08-14T10:11:00.001-07:00

Work has been busy and still next week is fully booked already. People are beginning to ask who else to see. I suspect I am going to start a blog on resources for researchers on USpace and see if I find any followers. Maybe I need to think wider than just me and see if the there is some way of doing this cooperatively either with others in the department or even wider. The fact is that most of the useful stuff I have come across has been by a process of trial and error or by odd links. Take the Thesis Whisperer for starters a good blog on the basics of writing a thesis and often where I learn of good process books. Then there was the fact I chanced on a Vitae blog “Whats up doc?” and the guy was worrying over his literature review. Now I know I am not doing a literature review, For a complex thesis like mine, separating the literature out from the rest of the writing seems to add a level of confusion. However he mentioned that the literature review was the introduction. Well ligth bulb moment, I knew that I needed to write and introduction but the clarity of thinking of it as connected with a literature review gives a clarity to the introduction that I had not had before. It still won’t be a literature review but it will probably set the scene in a variety of ways for what comes next.

On Tuesday I was down to Birmingham for the High Powered Computer session on running Window HPC. What we were looking for was a way to run Windows based products in a High powered computing setup. Unfortunately this does not do it. That is not to say it is useless, if as I suspect will be the case, that licensing can be sorted, then I could well see this allowing engineering and such to teach parrellel computing at a lower cost than at present. We would have a small server on site, which is actually all that is needed for over 90% of the time but when a class is in progress we might have the ability to up this quite quickly by connecting in machines over the net to something that is ten times that size. It needs high powered network infrastructure, and licensing by the hour (some companies will be in for a shock when that happens). The other thing I learnt was that there was a communication problem, when I say non-standard user for research machines, I mean people who are from the Arts or the softer end of the social sciences, when Birmingham says that they mean engineers and biologists. The problem is that for us the engineers and such are the chief users of our present Linux based HPC, I can not see any reason to introduce a Windows version for them. It is not widening our customer base. Another thing was the gender balance. The room had about forty people in it, of which two were female; this is the softer end of HPC and people wonder why I refer to it as “toys for the boys”.

For those who want to know, I saw no trouble at all on Tuesday night in Birmingham. The nearest I got to trouble was probably while changing train at New Street, but the trouble was not even that side of the city centre and I did not leave the station. Once off at Selly Oak I really was heading into deepest darkest areas of Quakerdom, not only staying in Woodbrooke Hall but also past at least one Quaker meeting house and en route to Bournville. Now as far as I know it is over two hundred years since the last time Quakers triggered a riot and they never went in for looting, so I was not really worried. For added measures there was the Christian Education offices is just up the road. I was greeted by the Quaker in residence with “You look as if you have come to stay”, I presume referring to the rucksack on my back. Normally I carry a small rucksack and a travel bag but had badly ricked my neck carrying the travel bag the previous weekend so had to find some way that suited me without carrying anything across my body. The simplest way was to take a weekend rucksack and a small light bag for day luggage.

The one effect of the riots was to make people reluctant to go drinking in places near New Street Station, not a problem for me as I needed to catch a 5:00 p.m. train from New Street and by 4:15p.m. I was tired and ready to head home. However the result of this was to find out that in the summer the University of Birmingham campus is dry until 5:15 pm! Well you can go to Spar, buy some drinks and sit on the concourse and drink them (brown paper bags are optional), but there is nowhere that serves a drink. I think its non-conformist roots were showing! With Sheffield there are so many non-university owned pubs on campus, there is no way this could happen.

Friday was Broomhall Breakfast and we had forty nine for breakfast. Actually most of the time we were coping fairly well as we had a good number of workers. Towards the end things got a bit interesting, a local lass who has come quite often in the past and has a sort of pastoral relationship with Sarah came in obviously nervous. So when Sarah came to take over my duties so I could eat my breakfast I pointed her in this girls direction instead. Then one of the breakfasters who had been in hospital with heart problems, came up and said the he was having a heart attack. I told him to sit down and called Jean Dickson out of the kitchen. I was suspicious that this was either him wanting attention, or that he was having some slight angina but was nervous and with that had jumped to the wrong conclusion. I just felt it needed sussing. So suddenly we were two workers down and Mary was having her breakfast when Stuart ran into difficulties copying the service sheet. The rest of Friday I just slept.

DSC_0021, a photo by jengie@btinternet.com on Flickr.

Saturday however I woke with a good amount of energy. I went shopping and was functioning pretty well although I forgot what I went to Boots for then walked back out of town. On getting in I happened to glance out of the window on the hall way outside my flat and spot two collard doves nesting on one of the tv aerials (see top of blog) so I went back and took some photos. I think this is the same pair as I saw a couple of weeks ago sitting on top on a lamp post on the close. I also uploaded other photos I have taken over the last few months so feel free to browse on Flickr if you want to. The rest of the day I did normal Saturday things, some supervision admin and so forth.

Today I was at Herringthorpe again and set up my last but one interview for a fortnights times. Otherwise it has been a normal Sunday.

Busy at work, while keeping other things going

2011-08-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

So what has been happening this last fortnight, well the first week was largely taken up with the extra classes for writers group (that and getting ready for supervision with a busy week in work). The thing being that I really needed two poems per week for three weeks. This is way above my normal turnover which is less than a poem a week with me using the holidays to get ahead so I don’t have to produce one every week. However with this being end of year, I had used up all my reserves during the year and had none to fall back on. So I needed to sit down and produce something, it took a while and at least one of the pieces I took one week and rewrote for the following week, but that was a major re-write and the tutor even commented on it. There are others who imagine that my short pieces are the easiest pieces to do, but in someways they take the most time as my imagination has to be clear to do them.

Work wise I am very busy, I suspect that I could easily fill a full working week if I wanted to but the only way to keep it sane is to try and limit it. Next week is already full with a little space the week after. I suspect things will ease at the end of August but I do not hold much hope before then.

Over the weekend I had the last of my general interviews for Herringthorpe and I am finding it harder and harder to stick to the interview schedule. The thing is the conversation around the interview is often far more relevant than the interview itself. I want the time to talk and the time to listen but the questions are really vehicles for enabling that and the tape recorder seems in many ways a positive hindrance. People don’t mind telling me things but put them on tape and they are not nearly as sure. Odd that as the point of having it on tape is so I don’t misrepresent them and the only people who may need to listen to the tapes are me and them. I have no plans for anyone else to listen. Anyway the couple are former missionaries of Pakistan and have done some work with Christian Asylum seekers in this country.

Last week with writers finished was slightly less frantic, but I had a supervision in Birmingham. My supervisor has sent me information on a study day in the autumn on liturgy and mission, from the same group that I went to the conference with last year. They must think they have not exhausted the topic. I will go to listen but at this stage in my thesis, I am not going to present a paper. I am too busy with writing up to my thesis to go through the process of preparing a paper. I appreciate the way my supervisor pushes me to actually think through what I am trying to say and find what is actually at the core of my thought. I was struggling with what was so special about church meeting. I have sat through enough to know that on the surface they appear meetings just like any other meeting but there was something about them that was drawing my interest and I had to work out what it was. It is a process not unlike that of poetry of going over and over the details until you find the key, the clue that attracts my attention, when I have that then I can build the argument around it just as when I know what I am saying in a poem I can build the description around that.The key gives the form to the whole thing.

Friday was busy, there were once again over forty for breakfast, I suspect that Olly who came to cook had not really been aware of the increase in number (it changes the organisation of cooking somewhat if you know that there are going to be over thirty for breakfast all wanting bacon). We discovered one of the guys was celiac when he brought special bread in. This is not a problem as once we know we can check provide the bread and make sure he does not get flour.Then came home and slept before going into work. If I am up about six to get to the Breakfast my body quite likes to sleep once it is over. At work I had managed to double book. I suspect because of diary changes and the prior problems with my diary, but fortunately had kept the last slot of the week free so that I could sort things for the following week. So I apologised and saw the person then. Then after work it was a trip down to Waitrose to get Minicol cream cheese for my parents, only there wasn’t any, but there was Minicol hard cheese and Benecol soft cheese that also was low in cholesterol. However Waitrose knew I was coming shopping for my parents as it did not have any decaffeinated coffee beans on the shelf. Then change around and catch the bus to the Dicksons, only I only had a £20 note and I realised I needed to buy a bus ticket, so I popped into one of the convenience stores and spotted they had Baklava that was similar to what I had been given some weeks earlier so I bought a packet and then remembering Mum was back on strict orders from the diabetic nurse I gave it to the Dicksons.

Saturday I went over to my parents. Apart from only starting slowly the trip over went smoothly though I was tired when I got there. Dad was also tired having had a somewhat disturbed night so both he and me went for a sleep on the afternoon. Then around 4pm he suggested a walk and I managed to persuade them to go to Reddish Vale, I drove as Dad was worried over finding parking places although he had to direct me. The first car park was full but the overflow had several spaces in it. I am encouraging them to try and go there about once a week for their afternoon walk as it is only a couple of miles away and really quite a pleasant place to walk. They have a small cafe open between 1pm and 4pm as well as what looks like a better quality one at the nearby farm. However there isn’t easy parking there and it is a bit of a walk from the country park. I think the highlight was that there was a greylag goose but Mum was quite thrilled with the banks of Jumping Jack Balsaam or Himalaya Balsaam which were flourishing in huge quantities along the river Tame at the time fo year.

Today has been spent with rather quietly with my parents. They decided they were staying home in the morning and only going to church in the evening. At around 12:30 Dad decided to show me a A6380 as it came into land at Manchester. Never mind that I had actually seen it the day before when I came into Stockport. Anyway they dropped me off so I caught the 4:54 p.m. train back to Sheffield.

Still busy but seem to be coping

2011-07-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

It has been a busy week but I am getting used to busy and I think managing to pace myself better than previous years. Some of this is to do with the fact that I actually have more stamina. I therefore don’t have to drive myself with adrenaline so much to achieve the tasks I need to achieve. That makes a huge difference at work as I am able to carry a heavier work load than I have carried for years.

My writers group had two meetings this last week again. The one on Monday I got the whole group laughing with the poem I brought. I am not sure that it would be funny to those outside the group as it was based on our own behaviour around the start of term although fictionalised. The second one I actually took a re-write of the poem I took last week which was aimed to now have a clear point to it, as what had previous been a purely descriptive poem was changed to say something more without being didactic.

Tuesday I was supposed to go to the party to mark the end of the Bible Study year only for once my subconcious decided quite definitely against it. I not only forgot to book the car but I managed to think I could set off at 6:45pm for a 7:00 pm party. That is not start the car at 6:45 but leave the flat at 6:45p.m which means at least another five minutes walk. As I would have had three really heavy days I was not altogether sorry.

Friday I did breakfasts again. This week I think we served 44 people. At one stage one of the guys, I think Alan called me “Sarah” I replied I wasn’t. Given that if it was Alan he had been calling me “Jean Jeanie” the week before I was not being too sympathetic. He then called me “Mary” which meant I think that he was just muddling me up with other people who regularly helped. That’s okay, I am still learning their names and its not helped by have several Daves, Johns and at least two Philips/, the distinctive ones such as Uri and Stephan tend to stick. Oh and one who came this week was a David Hill so I am hoping that the Rev David Hill does not decide to see what happens one week when he is here, it could lead to confusion.

Friday evening I went to see Calendar Girls which was what I hoped it would be. That is a good human story told with a lot of laughter. To my delight the vicar’s daughter at one time said “I’m a vicars daughter, a single mum and a church organist!” There is just something so true to life about that statement and it is not necessarily based on the real ladies of the WI who made the calendar, for starters there were eleven on them and only six in the show yet the story is believable.

So Saturday was the day I was going to really write the essay, well I got some of the writing done, indeed more than I expected, but felt slightly off colour all day. Fortunately for some reason my brain had been particularly clear on Friday and I had a rough plan of what I was to write. It is so much easier if you have an idea of where you are going. As I was writing about church meeting I thought I better get the relevant pages from the manual. It was quite interesting to read what is actually there and analyse them. There is a clear split of duties between the Church meeting and the Elders meeting. Church meeting has responsibility for mission and for the practical matters of running a church, finance, buildings and so on. Elders on the other hand has pastoral care and worship as its two prime areas of responsibility. What appears to have happened is the Deacon tasks from the Presbyterian Church have been assigned to church meeting while the elders meeting was brought in intact. Of course I have never come across a church that keeps to this boundaries.

Today awoke with the remains of a migraine at least I judge it as such as I did not want to keep my eyes open. So I slept in to 10:00 a.m. then got up and sat down and wrote. I finished about six O’clock but am aware that as it stands it is very much a collection of ideas around church meeting.

So tomorrow I am redrafting and also meeting Sarah for coffee. Not teaching this week, nor do I have Bible study but there are still plenty of people wanting to see me. Friday will be interesting as someone wants to seem me in work just after Broomhall Breakfast.

Busy working week followed by a quieter weekend

2011-07-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

This week has been busy and yet cope-able with. The main reason is that masters students are panicking over their projects. Unfortunately they tend to have the idea that I should drop everything and tend to them. I am however booked up for the whole of next week already and half of the week after. It is easing then as I am no longer teaching.but I have now set my email so that people emailing me get warned that I am busy. There is a marked difference between this and dealing with a masters student who already has a PhD. She asks for bookings weeks in advance and takes responsibility not only for being their herself but checking with her tutor. On the other had we hope she gets a paper in a good medical journal as a result of her work.

Monday was normal writers group, while Wednesday was the start of extra sessions. The only problem with extra sessions was that we had got it on a week where there was a great demand for tables. Not only were we wanting them but the Oratorio choir, a display in the church and Network. Next week neither Network nor the Oratorio Chorus are meeting! A week later start would have been so much easier. but that is life. The writers group did not realise that there were two groups on and not one.

Tuesday I had the second part of an interview that had been cut short last week. There was no way I was going to get away from work early and as the person I was interviewing was also going to Bible study there was a pretty fixed time. It was one of the few days I could not see how I was going to get an evening meal. So I treated myself to a brownie from PJ Taste which are really scrumptious. However once I was there his wife sussed I had not eaten and made me a sandwich and a piece of cake along with a coffee which I ate while interviewing. I have hopefully set up another interview the weekend after next and that really does put me on the home straight.

Wednesday was a meeting and teaching day in work. It looks like I will be down to Birmingham twice in August, once for supervision and once for work. This is about running servers for arts or social science research teams, who tend to use different operating systems to the hard science and engineering folk. It is a new area, but I suspect that unless we are prepared to provide a service that works for them we are going to struggle even more. These people use computers because they ease the work, they really do not want to struggle with the tricks that make things happen and idiosyncratic solutions will abound.

Thursday was quieter. Did I say this was going to be a quieter week, well it was than last week. I just was advising from 1pm to 5pm fortunately with someone I know really well. The result was at 3:30pm we both decided we needed a break, so went and got a coffee at PJ Taste as the Union would have been shut. This meant a change in venue.

This week there were only thirty eight to the Breakfast. I know that is only just under forty but it felt a lot easier than the last couple of weeks. This may be due to the fact that everyone hit the deck running,. Mary was there before 7:30 (Sarah and I at 7:30 and Roy and Beryl the cooks shortly afterwards). Mary had put on the ovens and the water and I knew I needed to look after the hall, checking things were done. Fortunately only Pat and Josh turned up very early and they are both workers, so less confusion over who was doing what. By the times the others had come in, things were largely sorted so the lounging around did not get in the way of doing the work. Josh is an absolute star, he comes early and helps set up, during breakfast he makes sure the tables are clean, have sugar and condiments, there is cutlery in the box and milk out. He will hand out Geo Bars if asked and basically keeps the hall running apart from serving and taking orders. However by the time I had shopped at Waitrose I was ready for bed again and slept for a couple of hours. Spent the rest of the day pottering.

Saturday was a quiet day, shopped, did some thesis reading and also sorted some of my back up of my thesis.

Today I went to Herringthorpe for morning worship. It was another believers baptism, this time of a lad about Sam’s age who is from a strongly URC background. The baptism seemed to be at a half way point between the full on evening service of some weeks ago and the normal morning baptisms. The service was an all age worship but none of the uniformed organisations were there. The music included a lot of the more modern hymns. This included Amazing Grace in the Chris Tomlin version ( listen to the whole to it as the first two verses sound very similar to the traditional).

Teaching, an interview and a study day makes for a busy week

2011-07-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

Right the past week has been busy. Monday was fairly normal Monday, indeed I had a bit more spare time to myself because the morning meeting I was expecting took only 15 minutes when I was expecting it to take an hour. Perhaps just as well as I had managed not to print out some output for people when they were with me the previous thursday and it was needed for a talk this thursday day so that gave me time to redo the analysis, print the output and send it over to them.. The afternoon was spent preparing to teach the course I was giving the following day.

Tuesday started with a team management meeting. I have the great management role of managing exactly one person, myself. This of course is anomalous but I actually find that work seems to quite value someone who is out of the power structures. When a debate is getting heated I can often reflect on what is being said and thus provide a different perspective. However this is the last meeting of the management of our team in this form, this is due to the team being expanded. On the afternoon I was giving a course on SPSS. I had one guy who had signed up hoping to learn about Excel. I am not sure where he got that idea from, the course is titled “Entering data into SPSS” and I teach exactly what it says. Over the years we have put a lot of effort into communicating this to people who come on the course. I stayed in on the evening.

Wednesday I took the day off work. This was to allow me to conduct an interview in the morning, to write it up and get to Birmingham in the afternoon. The only thing was that I got the time wrong in the morning and set off too late. What is more annoying is that the earlier time would have suited me better with the journey down to Birmingham. The result of which is that I will finish the interview next Tuesday. I seem to have a very considerate supervisor. I planned to get down to Birmingham for 7pm at Woodbrooke Hall, but knowing this was around supper time I bought food at Marks and Spencers but did not eat it, expecting to eat it either in my room or outside in their extensive gardens. Instead I found that my supervisor had booked me in for supper. So rather shell shocked I found myself in the dinning room of the hall amongst mainly Quakers who were there for a meeting on Peacekeeping.

Actually there are some things worth saying. I was the only person staying overnight from my supervisory group. I would guess most non-Quakers who stay there would be in groups. As I was one on my own, I was more mixed in with the other people around. Somebody asked actually on the Thursday morning whether I had found it strange. I replied no, I had found it right. I had been shown into a room with a bed and a desk and thought “this is my kind of place”. She commented that others might find that weird. The other was my supervisor asking whether I had been well looked after, I said “of course, this place is Quaker and I have always found them a hospitable people”. I have told my Dad that if he needs a place to stay in Birmingham it is a good place to stay.

The study day itself was interesting. I was surprised how close two of us were in what we were tackling. In a sense it works because both of us are approaching it from different angles and it is only a small part of either of our theses and we are coming from different directions. He is also two years behind me so I get to publish first if I stay the pace. The other guy had just finished spending time in Bromford which when he talked about it reminded me somewhat of Blackbird Leys but more cut off and isolated. He was asking questions about his responsibility to the very marginalised youth he had worked with and what was he to do.

Friday I was at Breakfast again, this time we had forty two but there were already over a dozen diners in the hall when I turned up. Next week I need to be more wide-awake when I get there, as it is clear that I need to supervise them putting out tables so that all the tables have chairs and also so the sign goes out. Oh well. The day in work was relatively quiet which it needed to be.

Saturday was quiet, the big news was that during the week I got back my backup drive (actually they have sent me a 2TB in replacement for a 1TB which I think means that there may be problem with the 1TB disks. I also am trying out Carbonite and if I like it will use it as a remote back up for my thesis machine. I am fortunate and have never lost something hugely important on a computer, but there is always the first time and I don’t want that first time to be my thesis. I will consider whether I do it on my laptop as well when I know how it is working. Other than that I did a shop and some reading.

Today I went to morning worship, at 10:15 the car park there was full to overflowing. The church was very full, with two baptismal parties as well as the normal congregation. They also had three people brought into membership and a meal afterwards for people who were relatively new to the church. I was reading the lesson Romans 8:1-17, I had prepared it from my copy of the Good News Bible. Unfortunately my copy is first edition and the ones in the church are second edition and so use inclusive language.

This week is still pretty busy although quieter than last. I am finishing an interview on Tuesday, teaching a course on Wednesday and my writers group has some extra sessions starting on Wednesday as well. Next Sunday Herringthorpe is holding its church picnic.

They call this quiet!

2011-07-03T06:08:00.000-07:00

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.

Heading off wildly in many directions

2011-06-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

I think I am going to have to write a highlights, but despite things being busy, (when aren’t they) I am not sure how many highlights I actually have.

Right on Friday 10th I went as I normally do to the Broomhall Breakfast. It seemed very light staffed, Mary was cooking, Jean was behind the hatch and Sarah was taking orders. Fortunately at that stage it also was fairly few clients. So I had my breakfast and then realised that Sarah might like hers so offered to take over orders. When I did that, Mary decided that, as it was quiet, she might as well have her breakfast, only for over ten people to walk through the door. This resulted in Jean cooking a couple of eggs just so the backlog did not get too bad. I have since volunteered to be around on a Friday until September time, so I now have to be up and ready to go by 7:30 a.m. in the morning on a Friday.

That evening I went out for a meal with James and Jean Dickson. Rather than cooking this time they decided to take me to the Bistrot Pierre on Ecclesall Road. The reason for doing so is that it does a gluten free menu and as their grandson is both a celiac and milk intolerant, they wanted to try it out before they took him. Their grandchildren are moving to Sheffield in a few weeks time. It was airy with glass all the way around, a good number of dinners and the food was good. They do a set of light main courses which were about the right amount for us to eat and they also do 500ml (2/3 of the normal bottle size) of wine which is very nice if only two are drinking , James was driving so didn’t. We came back to my place to have coffee and I found the bag of decaffeinated beans I had bought so we were fine.

That weekend I was writing, well I was analysing hymns. It is interesting, I think if I am right the hypothesis that the reason hymns are sung often is because they are “our hymns” does not seem to hold. Congregation’s do not sing hymns for the same reason football supporters chant at crowds, at least they don’t during normal worship. I suspect the hymns were being used for two different purposes in the two congregations. However what I am not yet clear on is what the hymnody of the tradition looks like. Do I go through Rejoice and Sing and pick out those with a definite “Reformed” background? Do I analyse “When I survey”, “We limit not the truth of God” “The Lord’s my Shepherd” and “Ye gates lift up ye heads” and use them as examples? If so what in the Churches of Christ one? Do I not bother but look to themes that come out of the tradition generally.

Tuesday saw me giving an NVivo course. This was full subscribed and well attended. I however am getting fed up with it being a talking head during it. I give a lot of information out but I am pretty sure most of it washes over people. They seemed appreciative but still I wonder. I was able to show someone at the end a quick way to get on with her coding but so hard to deal with a widely disparate group.

Thursday my new computer was set up and working in work. I actually found that having a faster machine makes a huge difference, it works at the problems I set it about the sort of speed my brain works at the commentary. So I don’t go off and think about something else while the computer is working and then have to pick up the pieces again. This means I work through things more efficiently. I got two large data sets ready for analysis by someone else during the week.

Friday I did the breakfast then did an interview for my PhD. It went well and I think I have only another three to do. This should be interesting as things are definitely now getting to the writing up stage.

I took twenty-four hours largely out from doing stuff from Saturday afternoon when I sent off my supervision papers and this afternoon when I went to evening service at Herringthorpe. A friend from my writers group had leant me “Into Great Silence” (that review is in depth good and worth reading to the end) It says there it last 2.5 hours in fact it is slightly longer than that. It is slow, slow enough for me to watch it and even in my own home I was drawn into it. It is beautifully shot and the repetition becomes slightly mesmerising. I thought that at the start the monks would blend into each other but they don’t. No two of them sit at prayer the same, their hands and heads are held differently. However when you see the older ones there is a real sense of laughter just trapped behind the eyes while the younger ones look more stern. It was three hours well spent and if I have the chance to watch it in a cinema I will take it.

When even quiet times are busy

2011-06-05T14:12:00.000-07:00

Monday my writers group met despite it being bank holiday, actually I spent most of the day doing practical administrative work for my PhD, getting copies of the recordings made while based at Chesterfield ready to send to the interviewees. This includes finding out what I had done previously, summarising content and making sure I have CDs, preparing covering letters and so on. It is also amazing how many mistakes you can make doing it. In the evening however I walked out through the Collegiate Campus of Sheffield Hallam University and on through Endcliffe Park to the home of Jenny one of my writers group. The walk out was good after the day doing admin and a small group of us meeting around Jenny’s dining room table was also nice.

Tuesday was back to work and I needed to finish off work I had intended to do on Thursday but the computer had been playing up. I sincerely hope the new computer comes soon. Tuesday evening I shopped as I did not need to go to bible study. Wednesday was also quiet with just seeing a single student but I had work that needed to be done. Thursday I joked with Margo after her first appointment of the day that I would get the piece of work I had been doing the previous day finished if there were no emergencies. My computer heard me because the keyboard promptly stopped working. I am pretty sure it was completely knackered as at one time the computer thought it was a mouse rather than a keyboard. So despite the fact that I have a new computer coming I had to get hold of another keyboard. They gave me what I suspect was old stock from the workshop which worked fine with my computer.

On Thursday evening my supervisor emailed me about making a study day at the start of July. There are three people associated with him who are all finishing ethnographic placements over the summer so the study day is to discuss finishing placements. Actually I would like some advice on balancing PhD with home church demands. It is very clear St Andrews is counting the weeks until I get back, but it is also clear that I need space to work on my PhD as I will only have a year to get it into a full draft.

Friday was my day off and I just carried on with doing the admin by early evening I had got them mostly finished. I still need to do this for all but one of the Herringthorpe ones. Anyway by afternoon they were ready and I went out to get them posted. So that is one admin job out of the way. There is plenty more to go before I can get writing. However chance to do some reading. So I took the plunge and started Jonathan Edwards “The Religious Affections”. Two things I have been reminded of in reading it. Firstly that by affections Jonathan Edwards does not mean affectations nor emotional responses. He means something much closer to purposeful intentions. That is not to say the emotions don’t have anything to do with it. For example if your intention is to visit your Grandmother, there is one thing that that is certain and that is it is not unaffected by emotions. Your emotions may be indeed very strong. In other words the will is affected by emotions. What makes these different from just assent is that it intentions that are strong enough to be followed through on. The second point is Jonathan Edwards is steering a middle course. He is not saying reason bad, emotions good; nor is he saying reason good, emotion bad. Rather he is saying that at the heart of religion is a synthesis of the two which leads to the development of the fruit of the spirit.

Saturday I went shopping, most of it was routine but I had seen a nice set of clothes in Marks last week and I decided that I would treat myself to this. I have really not had going out clothes for a while and there are a few things coming up where I could do with something smart but not too showy. Other than that I spent quite a bit of time curled up in the back room in a space I had cleared on the sofa trying to read some more Jonathan Edwards. Actually started enjoying it once I had actually got onto his own writing rather than the academic preamble. I am reading the Yale version.

Today was a normal Sunday. Herringthorpe seems to me at times to be a hyperactive child. To my knowledge today there was there was morning worship, pastoral visitors meeting 12:00 noon, pre-baptismal lunch-discussion, music group meeting and evening service. I suspect some people were here for three or more of those and NOT JUST THE MINISTER. That must be an exhausting pace to keep. Oh well I have got another interview set up.

So busy I almost did not have time for a migraine

2011-05-29T10:49:00.000-07:00

This week has been busy. Monday saw me in work early for an appointment with Margo and Toni, but Toni failed to turn up so we decided to change to looking at some work for Hilary. Only the work for Hilary threw a wobbler on us. It gave an unwanted result and when we unpacked it, it was obvious that we would need to analyse as two cohorts to explain what was going on. The biggest surprise was that it was showing a difference between ex-smokers and non-smokers. This is something that is totally counter-intuitive. The accepted wisdom is that as soon as you stop smoking your health starts recovering. On the afternoon I saw my boss for a monthly review and then it was writers group on the evening. The new light at the corner of the church is confusing us as it seems to switch itself on and off (well I have not found the switch). It keeps being suggested I should produce a pamphlet of poems but I just feel as if that is too much work at present.

Tuesday I saw Margo and we sorted Hilary’s analysis. It was not as tidy as I would have liked but as it was done in two hours that was the best I could do. My PC at work is also bugging me as it regularly hangs for no apparent reason. I know some of these times it is due to downloading over the internet but it really can be appallingly slow. On the afternoon I went over to see Kate, she is in education and is doing a project for a major art gallery on working with young artists. They wanted a pictorial presentation of the findings and my job was to show Kate how she could go from NVivo to the start of a pictorial presentation. What I suddenly realised half way through was here was something at which I was going to be rather good at. Not sure if I can produce these for my thesis. My supervisor would be highly supportive if I did, but I am not that far down the line. In the evening I was across to Herringthorpe for a Bible study.

Wednesday was quieter in work. I only had a query from a doctoral student from dentistry. These days these are the easy to do, although I know when I started that they used to produce interesting challenges. Things like people being interested in variability rather than absolute results. Dentist are culturally interesting; they are precision freaks, measuring everything several times and normally the biggest challenge is to sort out what level of variation is relevant to the particular difference. The evening it was time to go shopping and to get ready for going to Birmingham the next day.

Thursday I was off to Birmingham. It was a showery day but I seemed to have a good day for missing them. Supervisions tend to be huge moral boosters. I go in feeling as if the stuff is getting out of hand and come out feeling as if it tameable. Maybe that is a sign of a good supervisor. I need I think to tackle Jonathan Edwards on the Religious Affections next, well there is that and hymns. I also found a paper that looks as if my spatial models may be fairly well developed in America for Congregations, this is useful, especially as I seem to have most of the books and read quite a few. The chapter on space is coming along quite nicely apart from the fact it would be useful to find some text on a Reformed understanding of space. There is little there, although I have found some with respect to worship.

Friday was a day of happenings. Firstly I turned up at the Breakfast early as I had a 10 a.m. appointment, to find 18 or more hungry breakfasters and a short staffed kitchen. We got out another table as all the seats were already full and I did some time on the hatch. Shortly after me Kay came in and she had slightly more leeway but again needed to be off before the end. Then into work to see Ahmed and Alireza about study I had done. They wanted different estimates. In actual fact I had them although my computer was going slow so I only got one set out. I have another two or so to do. That evening I went to pick up my regular prescriptions from Boots. They are in charge of re-ordering. The only thing was that the prescription had not been dealt with so it was a matter of waiting while they rang the surgery for them to fax the prescription, then prescribing it and finally getting it filled. It was by then so close on closing time that the security guard was offering me free sandwiches. They had a number of sandwiches that were on their sell by date so if I did not take some, they would just go in the bin. However by the time I got home my head was definitely having a headache.

I woke up on Saturday without a headache but feeling out of sync with the world, as if it had spun a half degree further than I had. Anyway I got up and went into town but then messed up paying in cheques at the bank. At which point I decided that my brain was probably still fuddled and the headache was probably a migraine. Anyway shopped at Marks and Spencer and then caught the tram home on the grounds that I was not safe to be out. The shopping only came first because it was groceries for the weekend and no I could not face the walk up to the Co-op (Somerfield). I then went back to bed and slept for two plus hours. Why I could not do that first thing in the morning I do not know. Anyway sorted interviews from Chesterfield and know what processing I need to do to get them ready for sending out. In the evening Stuart came around and we went out to the Devonshire Cat. It was pleasant enough but they had music on and conversation tended to boom.

Today I was at Herringthorpe for morning worship, first time since I reported as I was at my parents last weekend. The feedback was actually very positive. One person apologised for not staying, another asked for a copy of the handout (all but one were taken on the day and I did about 45 which was 5 more than Pauline suggested) and then one person totally unsolicited said that I had got it very accurately. With my supervisor being impressed with it and saying that I had not only got the important things in I had also got the balance exactly right. I think I am counting it a success, of course it is a real success if it actually changes things.

Recovering from the bigness of last weekend

2011-05-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

Let’s see about this week. Well it has been quieter or at least I have been quieter during it. Then that was not difficult after the presentation last weekend

Monday I was going to go into work as I had a meeting with my boss, even though I had an essay to write and knew I also should be calming down after my presentation. However when I checked my work email before going in I found she had postponed the meeting. Therefore I decided to take the day off and get on with the essay. The essay was easy enough to write, well what I was writing of it. It is often only when you start writing about a topic that you realise the background that you need. In this particular case, it was hymns. I decided on a very broad brush strokes approach to classification and am now wondering on going back and reclassifying the revival based hymns. I will need to spend some time on the history of hymns, main problem is that there is a clear content difference between the top hymns as Herringthorpe and the top ones at St Andrews, this may be largely a construct of the fact Herringthorpe uses far more from the Charismatic’s stable while St Andrews uses far more Modern ones. I am at present struggling to classify it but I suspect broadly speaking Charismatic ones tend to focus on the work of God while modern ones tend to focus more on our response to the work of God. Anyway I got it finished and to writers group that evening which was good.

However having had an unexpectedly good day on Monday, Tuesday hit me for a six. I think I had a migraine, I also lost my voice. I lose my voice less often these days than I did a decade ago so it was a surprise to find I suddenly had no voice. Having had this originally as my day off I had no appointments so did not feel too bad over ringing in sick. It also meant that I did not make Bible Study on Tuesday evening. There may be no need to speak at Bible study but there is an need to respond to people when you socialise around it and I have yet to find a way of being in public space and not talking too much for my voice when it fragile.

Wednesday I had a frail voice back so went into work. However I had a meeting I had missed the previous time it was on and then prayer meeting so I went. The first meeting suggested that it would be a good idea if the department knew how many papers we had published. It does the department some good as it shows we are supporting researchers. However whether I should have done is a mute question as my voice was still very frail and had disappeared completely by the end of prayer meeting. However knowing that I had no voice on Wednesday afternoon I put things together so that I could do my SRDS preparation the next day at home. This included going through various work records and also getting hold of departmental plans. They always say they are assessing against departmental aims but then I usually find that they are assessing me against institutional aims.

Thursday I worked at home, first doing the SRDS and then submitting my papers for my supervision. This was a quiet day in and was exactly what my voice required although I went to the doctor’s for a routine visit and then onto work to lend Rosie my album from the time I spent as a volunteer on Iona because she is going up there at the end of this week.

Friday I had my voice back, which is good but with not having it earlier in the week I had deliberately been making appointments for this week rather than for Friday. I also had an email I needed to respond to and also an analysis I needed to do. I however also went and checked for papers I was either author on or acknowledged. I found that I was author on 17 papers and acknowledged on another 25. The biggest number that is missing is the number of theses I am acknowledged on and I suspect that would quite possibly take me close to a hundred or so. The problem is that the theses are rarely online so the only way to find out is to go to the library and check all the theses. On the evening I went out the Herringthorpe’s Ladies’ night. I thought this was going to be an art evening in the practical sense, but no it was a demonstration by a lady who has been an art teacher for ages although she herself is self taught. She chose to do an autumn scene in pastel, it was interesting watching her work but pastel is not my thing although I have had some fun with it.

At the weekend I was over with my parents. They are chunttering along as usual. Ruth came over on Saturday and helped tidy the garden. It now needs some fresh flowering plants in it to bring colour in amongst the green. However I am not sure what is the best way of getting such plants into the garden. It is not enough just to buy them as mum could really do with someone coming along to plant them as well. At present I think immediate colour is probably more important than longevity. Today I did the routine checks on Dad’s computer that I try to do every time I am over. He has Anti-virus and I try and also do a couple of scans for malware and spyware plus checking to see if his version of Windows is up to date. The later is not usually necessary, but Dad tends to only have the computer on for the short times he is actually using it and I suspect that sometimes when this is the case the computer does not always up date when it should. I had planned to do this while they were at church but they decided with the showery weather that they would go this evening in the car instead of walking this morning. So after a while Dad came down to join me basically to see how I was getting on. Anyway he stayed for a while until when the last download was taking slightly longer I suggested we went up for coffee rather than wait. Mum had decided as she had nothing better to do that she would cook dinner which was therefore would have been ready about 11:30. Anyway we persuaded her to come through and have coffee with us although she was cross with us for leaving her alone for so long (about an hour for me, less for Dad).

The week leading to presentation at Herringthorpe

2011-05-15T14:03:00.000-07:00

This week has been dominated by the fact that I was giving an initial report to church meeting at Herringthorpe today. In some senses even when I write now of other things that was still going on in the background.

Monday my writers group started again. This is good news as in some ways this has become one of my safety valves, a place where I go not to talk about thesis but to discuss other things and for which I have to be creative in a different way. Actually the big discipline that comes with this is that I have to actually stop and look at something rather than presume I know what I see. They also are a group with which it is pleasant to hang out with. It has become another non-negotiable of my life. In work I repeated an analysis I had done about three times already, finally sorting out what I wanted to do. The funny thing was that the results came out for what the original topic of interest was.

Tuesday was a fairly busy day in work. We had a team meeting with the head of department at ten O’clock where she talked about Lean process management. It is something that vaguely interests me. It Looks at redesigning processes so as to make them more efficient by removing stuff that does not provide value to the customer. What is important is to realise that backup/fallback procedures do provide value.

Wednesday I decided to work at home as I desperately needed to get the report into slides. I had actually finished preparing the handout first as I found working in Publisher easier for ordering ideas than working in Powerpoint. Actually the putting together of the slides was relatively easy. You just had to design the slide to portray the idea. I kept the slides visual and short.
Thursday in the morning I spent time dealing with a bright student who really needed to be told to do a qualitative approach at least to start with. Once they have the coding sorted then hopefully we can export to SPSS. Then on the afternoon did a run through of my presentation with my boss in work so I know that I had made it understandable to people with no background in the social sciences. I deliberately tried not to do anything that evening

Friday was my day off. In the morning I had coffee with Sarah, I had a strange feeling that neither of us really wanted to get up from it and do other things. For Sarah it was probably a good chance to sit down after the business of Broomhall Breakfast, with me it was partly coming back to thesis although I was actually noting what hymns the churches had used while I was there. From fairly early on while I was at Herringthorpe I have kept a note of the hymns that were actually used as there was a dispute over their use. St Andrews Chesterfield printed theirs on their weekly newsletter. So I have this information for both churches. It was a matter of abstracting it and then categorising it. I had to develop a coding categorisation, because of the congregations I have used a four part code characterisation. I picked any material pre 1840 as traditional; this is set as the start of Queen Victoria’s reign. Then for material between 1840 and 1960 I called it hymnody, this was to reflect the high number of hymns written between those times and in use. Later material was not classed on a time basis rather I distinguished what I call Modern Liturgical including many modern hymns but it is broader than that, which is material written for use in formal worship since 1960 and Charismatic which is material coming out of writers identified with the charismatic renewal. If I was studying this in-depth I would want to subdivide all four categories. For instance I have metrical psalms put in with translations of ancient hymns with the hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. In the next I have Revivalist hymns aside high Anglican ones and so on.

On the evening I made a big mess. I managed to book a Tesco’s delivery for just the time I was at the Dicksons. Not just that but I also managed to get into my head the wrong time so it was only when it did not arrive by seven that I checked the times. In the end Tesco’s very kindly agreed to redeliver today and James came to pick me up. Very thankful for people’s considerateness over what was completely my mess up! The evening was enjoyable as ever.

Saturday was just more work on the hymns followed by setting up the sound system at St Andrews so that a guitar could be played through it, I hoped it worked ok as though the technical solution was in place, it also required the operator to balance the levels of the voices and the guitar! Something no operator had done previously. On the morning a quick run to the shops. The rest of the day was thesis both working on the hymns and today’s presentation. Unfortunately by this point I realised that nerves were taking over and needed some controlling

Today presentation day! Actually things went pretty smoothly only I had put too much in. I turned up at the church only to find that it was parade and the car park was full. God must have heard my heart cry because a car promptly pulled out of a parking space! Not usual ten minutes before worship in the church carpark! I got asked on entry to the church whether I was rehearsing my presentation, no I replied thanking God for providing a parking space. The idea of having to move the car in the time between worship and church meeting just felt too much! I got through three quarters maybe more of the presentation. The moderator commented that on there being not enough time to do this sort of presentation in church meetings. I don’t think people understood that I was hanging around to calm down afterwards, I have been so intently involved in doing this presentation and so focused on presenting it well, that I was quite sure that I would technically not be in a good state to be driving on the roads immediately afterwards. Anyway came in had a bacon sandwich and a glass of wine and went to bed for an hour and a half.

Two Weeks trying to get back into an even pace after Easter

2011-05-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

I am going to need a long memory to remember back to the Easter bank holiday, I expect because it was fairly quiet.. Work was quiet with a lot of people taking advantage of the two double bank holiday weekends but I still ended up with plenty of work to do.

So will you excuse me while I move quickly onto that Thursday which was a supervision date in Birmingham. The supervision was as early as I can really make in that it was at 12:30 and the first train I can travel on gets me in at 11:30. Yes it is only a fifteen minute walk from the University station but I don’t like to arrive anywhere with less than an hour before an appointment if I am travelling by train. The campus was being host to a large number of school students who were taking advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to eat their packed lunches outside. My supervisor had two more theses bound upon his desk. He is supposed to be rationalising the number of students he supervises as the central system noticed suddenly he had far more than they expected staff to. This might not totally be his fault, he had when I started inherited rather a lot of students from a former colleague who had left to work elsewhere. He also has a fair number of students who have been in the system for rather a long time. Then the two students graduating may well only reduce his numbers by one as one of them was seriously thinking of returning for a doctorate.Anyway the result of having a fairly early supervision meant that I spent a fair time checking papers and still managed to get the 4pm train from Birmingham New Street and therefore bought myself a meal from Marks and Spencer and walked home.

On the Friday my parents came over. We did not do anything spectacular. My hairdresser was open so I had my hair cut and there was a street party on the road outside the shop. Not really your traditional sort of neighbours all joining in, rather a group of market stall holders got together to put up some tables and people could buy food off the food stalls and eat it at the tables, I think there probably was a TV screen up somewhere and there were other stalls selling stuff. Maybe even a small stage. However the hairdresser informed me that there was a flower market on in town so when I had collected my parents from the coffee shop in West One and then wandered down. The market was a general one although there was a large area selling plants. Anyway Mum bought a decent macaroon and a not so good chocolate brownie.

Saturday was a quiet day. That is my decision was to basically havea normal Saturday and to try and start putting together the presentation for Herringthorpe. Now there was an alternative. I could have decided to go the Herringthorpe Royal Wedding party, but that just seemed like too much for me. I believe it was a really splendid affair and the photos which I saw on the following tuesday seemed to indicate many people enjoyed themselves.

Sunday last week was very hectic. There was church in the morning which had quietened down somewhat from the pre-Easter frantic activity, but still a good turn out. Then I nipped home to get lactase tablets as I had forgotten to bring them, what I did not realise was I also needed to change. Then it was off to have lunch with a family. This family has been missionaries in Pakistan and are still in contact with the Christian community out there.After talking with them it was clear that the problem is not so much the blasphemy law but a societal behaviour that makes people over zealous for the honour of Islam and where the slightest suggestion that you may have done something dishonouring will lead to mob violence. This plays into the hands of the unscruplous, who can make allegations without really having to face consequences if the are wrong. Afterwards dinner which was delicious, we went for a walk around Uley Reservoir which is pleasant place for a walk. There was a cott with chicks just by the nest. Some of the chicks were in the water and some were on the nest. The coot seemed to be adding extra material to the nest, I wonder if this was to accommodate her growing family. There was also thousand of tadpoles at the side. As we past the boating house the girls heard wind chimes. This reminded me that Stuart had told me the previous evening that he had been out to visit a friends grave there in a woodland cemetery.

After that I went home changed and then back out as evening service had been cancelled so one of the normal attenders was having a social at her house. The main topic of conversation when I arrived was the Royal wedding, both the actual event and the party the day before. The hosts son and a friend who is the son of head of the local Christian Homelessness Project were playing in the back garden. They had “put up” a tent intending to sleep in it and got bedding down from the sons bedroom. However I would not have put much money on the tent staying up and the father of the visiting lad had said he would not spend the night outside.

At this point I felt that was enough socialising for me plus presentation was calling but the next day a group was also going out to Rufford Country Park. So Monday was spent in largely being fairly quiet indeed I had over done it and as much of the presentation as I would have liked did not get done.

Tuesday I was in work and had a very bitty day. nothing major, meeting in the morning, a missed appointment in the afternoon and four papers fighting for attention including one on which I am sole author. My liturgy paper should be in Anaphora I am glad to have done it. Then there was house group on the eveing. One of the leaders defined being spiritual as being Christian, that is not how the word is used in wider society!

Wednesday brain through a wobbler and I had a migraine which was most uncomfortable. I am used to the sort that lands me in bed and asleep pretty quickly but this timeit just made everything uncomfortable.

Thursday I got through a major analysis but I still have to write it up so will have a go next week. Then I will have to see if the student can make any sense of it. Otherwise an uneventful day with nothing much to report.
Friday I think I broke the back of the handout for the presentation. That might sound odd, but I had to find something to put my thoughts in order. Too many ideas not enough narrative. I have lots of ideas of ways to put across themes, it is just putting them into a form where I can present. I actually am finding publisher more useful for doing that than anything else. Part of the problem with Powerpoint is some of the visuals are not computer based and are better presented by other means but powerpoint does work for things that are computer based.

Saturday was quiet and fairly productive. It almost fell into a routine with two hourly slots. Cooking 9-11, shop 11am-1pm sleep 1pm to 3pm PhD work 3pm -5pm and so on. It was quite funny how the pattern appeared out of nowhere.

Sunday is today and I spent this morning watching the Sheffield Half Marathon. I’d checked the route yesterday and it was situated in such a way that I had two choices, set out half an hour at least early and see if I could find a way around it through Sheffield back streets (it ran from Don Valley Stadium to at least Hunters Bar on the Ecclesall Road through the centre of Sheffield. It was like having a major line drawn between me and Rotherham. It also closed the route north to the M1. Well as Jon the youth and children’s worker at Herringthorpe was running I thought I would go and watch it instead. It really is quite impressive to watch with the hordes of runners taking over an hour to pass once they had got to Devonshire Green.

Preparing for Supervision during Holy week

2011-04-24T14:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-03T13:19:00.000-07:00

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.

Thinking on Church Websites while on strike

2011-03-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

This week has been odd. I am hoping that one of these weeks I will get a week in which I am able to be in work for four days, however the reason this week was strikes. Now I am not a great fan of strike action, but the UCU rarely uses it (I think this means I have withdrawn my labour for one working week in the nineteen odd years I have been in HE). In this case, I suspect the jobs issue is a no win one but perhaps an idea of feelings, Pensions is a bit more about fairness, when the stockmarket was doing well the Universities as employers took a holiday from contributing, now it is doing badly they don’t seem to understand the quid pro quo for having taken that. However my main reason for striking is I belong to the Union, I appreciate the work the Union does on my behalf (having been regraded un-unionised and regraded unionised I can tell you which one was the better outcome), and I also believe that if ever things came to a dispute between me and the University I would want the backing of the Union. Given that I don’t believe in being a fair weather trades unionist and only belonging when I want to, so I was on strike. So although I was in work on Monday, which was quite quiet and Wednesday but I was off Tuesday, Thursday and Friday (Friday being my day off).

I am afraid striking and research do not mix. Tuesday was the sort of day where if I would have been in two minds about whether I could work or not. I was feeling off colour but nothing very specific but as I was on strike I went back to bed and slept it off. I then spent quite some time reviewing Herringthorpe URC website ( but it has been updated since and is updating) for the church. I am surprised myself in doing this. Firstly there are some things that have not changed. Much of what I thought was appropriate for the front page, is still what I think is appropriate for the front page. However my focus for the site has changed. As far as I can see for communication within the congregation there are better ways such as email or Facebook (if the congregation has enough young members) and the older ways bulletin sheet, newsletter, notices and the good old phone call all still work. So it is a noticeboard or a shop front. So what are we selling, well the services yes. But rather than just the name time and place, how about something telling them what a service maybe like?

I have this little script going through my head for Herringthorpe:

(IA is a member, VB is a visitor)

IA: People tend to be slightly early for church, this is often so they can have a natter and so with their friends, you are given a notice sheet when you come in and there are notices up on the projector screen

VB: So how do you know when worship is about to begin?

IA: Well at about the time the Bible is brought in!

VB: is that the start of the service.

IA: No, its a mark of respect for the bible and a sign to shut up, because then further notices are given from the front

VB: You do seem to put an awful lot of effort into notices,

IA: Well there are always last minute alterations and the in case of fire notice, but when they are finished they ask for silence

VB: So that is the start of the service?

IA: Well no, the real start is when the minister stands up afterwards and says the opening sentences

VB: the what?

We need to stop assuming people know what happens in church and start trying to inform them.

Christianity and if so what form and style? Why us and not the next church down the street? Try and give something that has a personal touch, something that says “ours” rather than try to compete with the highly skilled apologetical sites. What they can’t do is give the view from the point of view of a person people might know a normal person. Alright so it might be a normal person like the individuals granny but still not a celebrity or a theologian. The thing is the issues talked about are likely to differ as well. You do really need a very skilled apologist to explain the Trinity, but why someone enjoys singing in the choir on a Sunday, is surely not within their brief.

Other are perhaps more mundane. Do we have good child safety polices, disability awareness? Where do we stand on inclusion? but there are other things that people might be looking for, they maybe looking for a venue for a wedding or somewhere to have a child baptised (yes I know the problems but it might be as well to give them something to think about before they approach rather than leave it all to the minister). Then there is room hire and other activities. Do you perhaps want to recruit people for social outreach project or raise awareness of certain issues?

It took longer than I planned but my brain has obviously been thinking. I also had to get onto thinking about what I was going to tell Pauline on Thursday. On a sadder note I discovered that a member of my writing group had died on Sunday night. She had been suffering from Breast Cancer for the last nine months but was suddenly in great pain last Sunday evening and died that night. If you have spare prayers could you pray for J and her son T and daughter A. The funeral is on Friday, I am still deciding whether to go.

Wednesday was very ordinary, although coming back from prayer meeting at St Andrews I think I saw a buzzard soaring on the thermals above the buildings on Glossop Road. Now I am not sure. The soaring behaviour was clearly there but at first I thought rook or crow, but rooks and crows don’t usually do that. Then a couple of gulls came past and they were clearly smaller.

Thursday was a big thesis day. I went to see Pauline for lunch and then to talk about reporting back.They have a young golden Labrador called Emma and she was very suspicious of me at first but once she had established that I was not a threat to her directly and none of the humans regarded me a threat she went and slept in her cage while we ate lunch. Then spent an hour or so talking with Pauline. Pauline definitely deliberate over her choice of space. That is not a problem so am I. This time we were in the music room, which has a couch that just seats two people. This says something quite clearly about equality and closeness.

Then it was on to interview Henry. This was really one of the most important interviews of my time. In the end for very different reasons to the interview with the equivalent person at St Andrews Chesterfield. Henry is 99 and has been with the congregation for close on ninety years. He became church secretary a very short time after he joined and served for 17 years. During those years the congregation would have gone from being Congregational to URC. Henry came from another Rotherham Congregational church. All this is true but Henry does not really live in the past, he seems to live in a continuous present. His relationship to Herringthorpe is rather like a man who has been married for fifty years and can’t see the changes in his wife. It is not that they haven’t happened it is that the changes have happened as much to him as to the congregation. That at least is my tentative understanding. Oh and what would he like to have happen, more people worshipping particularly more young children in the Junior Church. He did lend me a history of the church, interestingly over ten years old.

Friday was the sort of day when I got things done simply because I was at home. Time of the month came and it was uncomfortable most of the day. However as I was largely in I could sleep when I wanted to and work when I felt able. Saturday was also quiet although I got some PhD reading and Stuart came around in the evening and we shared a bottle of Ame and hot cross buns. I got reheating them right this time and they were warm without being too dry. By the way I think my favourite Hot Cross Buns are Marks and Spencers Cranberry and Orange. If I am in Waitrose I get their saffron buns instead.

Today morning church with another Baptism, Herringthorpe does seem to get a good number of baptism. This family clearly had church contact, were singing along to the hymns and as they were mainly fairly new ones out of Songs of Fellowship, this suggests recent as well. They indeed did know one or two members but did not really seem to be part of the Herringthorpe wider community. Other than that resting and generally not doing much.

Supervision in the midst of a cold

2011-03-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

Right this has been a mixed week. I really have little recall about Monday, I went to writers group and took a poem which I wrote when I was playing. This was a one off and when I say playing I mean playing, I was building a tent in my main room made of blankets and clothing horses. Something I used to do a lot of as a kid, and this one evening decided to do so again. What was interesting was how other writers picked up both the child and the adult in the situation.

Tuesday I was struck down with another cold lurgy, I decided to take the day off and as I was going to Birmingham for a supervision the next day I felt staying in was sensible. Actually on the Wednesday the lurgy was kept under control quite well with cold supressants and caffeine. If only the previous one had been so amenable! I have covered a lot of ground this last month, I am still stumbling for a language, metaphor or analogy to use to explain what I am covering. I am thinking that I will probably end up talking of technologies within the Reformed Tradition, meaning technology in the Foucauldian sense (must read Discipline and Punish the birth of the Prison because I suspect we are adopting “softer” technologies of that sort). Actually I suspect society is moving towards softer technologies so it is not surprising that the church is. However what is it a technology of, I alternated between being a technology of self (see Weber) and a technology of faith. Other options considered are culture, (I would say many of the current technologies are cultural but to call them culture seems wrong, something to do with the relationship between culture and the individual), spirituality (in the sense the way to be a Reformed Christian, what sort of behaviour is expected), tradition (how is the Reformed nature of the congregation created in this setting and why is it Reformed and lets say not Anglican), ecology ( how do things work in this setting). However by the time I got home on Wednesday (I actually spent quite a time after the supervision working through papers, some interesting but when will I get around to reading them) I was caffeined out (i.e. taken in as much caffeine as I could) and still not feeling if I had the energy for getting home. So I decided that treating the next day as still cold was probably essential.

Friday I was at the Broomhall Breakfast, I picked up an email on the morning from Sarah saying would I do a computer consultation at breakfast. It actually turned out to be a misunderstanding. The reports were Excel spreadsheets but because they had been called reports Janet’s supervisor had thought that they would automatically given him the figures. This had never been as far as I know in the work flow. The workflow was for the data to come to me and then that to be turned into figures, the advantage being that I can turn around data in about 24 hours if I don’t have to enter it. If I enter then at least a week is needed. Ah well. I also went into work. Not sure I did much more than catch up but anyway.

Saturday I had a quiet day, shopped, mainly food. I also realised that I have spent around £250 on books with Amazon this last month. I know that is a lot, not all those are for reading, some are background reference but when someone in one book refers to another I need to be able to trace. Often it is only sections of books. A lot of what I am buying are scans of out of print books. However it was good to have a lazy day.

Today worship in the morning was all age and very noisy parade service. At one stage they had us singing along to a CD that was so loud I had to cover my ears as it was painful, alright I was directly beside a speaker but a bit lower volume would have been a good idea. Had an equal opportunities moment, there was a dramatised session on Ruth and I think they had not managed to find anyone to be Orpah’s husband. So they asked who was willing to hold someones hand look blissfully happy and then die a horrible death on stage. The only volunteer was a girl scout who is regular member of Sunday School. So we had the story of Ruth with a civil partnership! Then back again this evening for a session on being guided by the Holy Spirit. Now was the Holy Spirit guiding this morning if so why did the Holy Spirit let people forget to have a technical rehearsal? Oh the imponderables of life.

Busy time, with many different paces

2011-03-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

Right the week after I wrote was quite exhausting, not only was I only semi-fit, no cold symptoms but I tired easily, but there was a Data Curation Roadshow I was attending for two days with work. Having two full days when I was dealing with people (largely strangers) continually for four to five hours was exhausting. The topic was interesting and I am fully aware of the gap between what does happen and what ideally should happen. At the moment if you are fortunate then if you want the data behind a paper, the researcher has it on a disk which they can unearth. If you are unlucky then they have long ago chucked out the scrap of paper which the original data was on after all they had gained the publication. This is true except for a few high profile disciplines and some very large studies where the data is fully documented and stored on secure maintained fileservers. What we need to do is move to a method of automatic archiving of data with regular reviews but that will cost a huge amount and nobody has yet found a funding model by which it raises money. Also once the research is complete a researcher often looses interest in the data set, also many researchers don’t feel they have data, they just have video recording and pictures and such.

In the middle of attending this course I also had an interview for my PhD. It was with a couple about my age and their son aged about my nephews age. This is the second time a child of that age has been interviewed but both times parents were present. Often when I am dealing with people who are younger members they are less what my supervisor calls insiders than older members, now this couple were as much insiders as me. The boy Luke lasted all of twenty minutes and then went back to playing with his Xbox. At the end of the time they asked whether I had anything to input about the mission of the church. This was because they had an elders retreat day this weekend that was looking at the mission of the congregation particularly with respect to the children’s work. The problem is not shortage of children, they have around 100 children on the books at present, but shortage of leaders. Well I stalled, not because I had nothing but I have a huge amount and it is still at a fairly unprocessed state. Anyway of the following two nights I wrote up both the interview and but a short paper together and emailed it to both them and the minister. It was pretty much thrown together, however it had the core of what I wanted to say to the church. I suspected that the minister would want to get back, but although I made it clear I was ready to talk, she didn’t. We will see how it develops.

Over the weekend I was writing, it was interesting to do, the time I had and the word space meant that I could not do justice to my sources. The piece therefore I feel is sketchy, I have more to do and this is only my first real attempt to write something about Reformed tradition as central to my PhD rather than as something that runs alongside it. It is surprisingly different how I can think when addressing this issue. It is as if the sociologist becomes dominant rather than the person who does organisational studies, I suspect that actually by looking at it, I distance myself from some of the Reformed character in me, who actually feels rather at home in organisational studies, this is the stuff we handle rather well. Sometimes I suspect we are too good at organisation and could do with a bit more chaos. I also conducted a second interview on the Sunday this time with someone who was very new to church (yes all church) having only been attending Herringthorpe for three years and before that churches were places for hatching, matching and dispatching but she had married into a Christian family and when her husband had wanted to return to church she had ended up going with him to Herringthorpe. I am however rather relieved to find Philip Benedict has written “Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social history of Calvinism” which covers upto about 1700, it means a different perspective at least on the early stuff and the last section is titled “New Calvinist Men and Women” and I suspect it will be useful.

This week was quieter in work which in someways was good. I managed to get the papers off to my supervisor although I am now seeing him on Wednesday next week instead of Thursday. I suspect that he did not realise Thursday was St Patricks day as his excuse is that he had to be in Liverpool on it. That would fit with his current research topic, he did Chinese New Year in London last year, I did a quick google for a related paper but can’t find any. It may be a totally different situation. I also found the week slightly confusing as I took Tuesday as my day off to finish my essay as I had so much on, on Monday.

On Friday evening I went to James and Jean Dickson for the evening. They seem to be keeping up pretty well given that James is 80. I had spotted that the building that has my office in has a map of the area before St Andrews was built with lots and lots of wells marked, as these wells do not seem to be attached to particular property I suspect they mark the site of springs coming to the surface. I mentioned this to James and he wants to take a photograph of this map. We shall see if this is possible on Tuesday.

This weekend I have been over to my parents, on Saturday we had lunch with Ruth she seemed to be in good form. She cooked a meal that suited us all very well including fruit salad. Although some restraint was practised over the delicious first course none was practised with the fruit salad. The only snag was my parents had decided that as I was over it was chance to eat lots of nice food, so they had salmon for supper as well. I spent quite a bit of time making sure Dad’s computer was virus free, except I suspect it was never infected but his mechanices account had been compromised and someone was spoofing emails using my fathers email address which they had got from his account. Today I ended up entertaining my parents by reading postings Crappy Choruses and Horrible Hymns thread on Ship of Fools which had them giggling. Some of the pieces really demonstrate what can go wrong while composing pleasant dittys to the Lord. I went back

A week in due to a cold

2011-02-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

There isn’t much news this week due to the cold. Normally if I get a cold and I can spend the first day in and bombing it, that is the last I hear of it. Not the case with this one. Having spent last weekend in I was hoping to go into work on Monday only for it to boil out over night. So cancelled Monday’s meetings in the hope that I would be better for Tuesday as I was teaching.

I did do the teaching on Tuesday but even with fairly strong suppressants I was far from well and thoroughly exhausted by Tuesday evening. I knew that even if the cold would miraculously get better overnight I would still have been exhausted on Wednesday. However the symptoms started to ease Wednesday afternoon although I still tire easily but I am not coughing and spluttering all over the places as I was earlier on.

The up side of this was that I have got a lot of reading done. Not only did I manage to finish David Cornick’s book “Letting God be God” but also “Living the Christian Life” by Robert Ramey and Ben Campbell Johnson. The second book, if anyone is considering doing a membership refresher course might well be worth considering as it looks at different aspect of Reformed community life although it is based in PCUSA rather than the UK, also I have read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (the Guardian has a decent review. However speaking as someone from a URC perspective, Robinson must be an acute observer. She gets things right in ways that had be laughing with recognition. That says something. Is it accidental that John Ames good friend is Boughton the Presbyterian Minister in the town or that they tend to agree at least on matters of theology? I am now about half way through Richard Baxter’s Reformed Pastor. It is a fuller edition rather than the shorter one many have read. I think next will actually be “Working the Angles” by Eugene Peterson for a modern view on pastoral care (he was minister at a Presbyterian Church for thirty years).

Yesterday Mum and Dad came over for the morning. This time the request was not to go into town but to go and shop in Waitrose. There appear to be a few things that mum and dad have difficulty getting locally that they can get from Waitrose but they failed to get decaff coffee beans. If I had been up to it, I would have tried to persuade them to go into town to Pollards the specialist coffee shop and to see if they had the beans but after lunch I was very tired, I presume due to the cold so sent them home and went and slept myself.

Today I went to Herringthorpe in the morning. It was the Sunday after Holiday Bible Club, but please don’t think of the chaos that used to be around them at Parrswood. Here as it is holiday there were a few children with grandparents who aren’t there usually but junior church is reduced as quite a few are taking the last weekend away after helping at Holiday Bible Club. There also was a lady talking about the Christian Bookshop that has been set up in Rotherham. However please don’t get any hopes up, this is a small venture and definitely evangelical in bias. It really takes some skill to have a bookstall with nothing I want to buy on it.

A positive whirlwind of a week

2011-02-20T08:55:00.000-08:00

Right lets see, this week has been eventful but largely pleasant. Monday the big thing was that I was in work. That may seem odd but if I am going to get a migraine then the usual time is shortly after time of the month, for this month I worked out that that was the last possible date for it to happen.

Also over the weekend I posted the following blog post in response to something on Facebook. It was one of those occasions when I felt compelled to respond to something due to who I was in contact with on Facebook. I function so often as if I don’t have mental health distress, that I suspect that people hearing about it, may consider me lying. I certainly in my public behaviour don’t fit the stereotypes and as my health has been improving recently I do so less and less. This as a rule makes me less and less willing to talk about it. The last thing I want people to think is that because I can cope with what I can cope with that other people with mental health distress should as well. However it comes differently when someone is feeling isolated due to mental health problems. It is however always nerve wracking when you reveal something like this and I wondered what would be the outcome. However that piece did all I wanted it to do.

In work this last week I have been working to do the final analysis of Butyrate paper so that it could be put into a presubmission draft. Hopefully by the end of this week the main author will have got it into a form where it can be submitted.

On Thursday I went down to Birmingham for a supervision for my PhD. My supervisor moved it forward to 12:30p.m. as he wanted to get home to be with the dogs as his partner was away or that was partially a front. I suspect that with last times supervision being rushed due to management issues at the University he decide that this was not going to be a single hour supervision. It is one of the very few times I have ever had claustrophobia at the end of a supervision, but as that is my usual response to when big things happen. The supervision resulted in a major realignment of my doctorate, the reasons for this is good, it plays to my strengths in thinking theoretical, it builds on a long term sociological debate in a positive way. Sociology for a long while has been divided between those who are big theorists who see everything as determined by society; on the other hand are those who see everything as determined by the freedom of the individual. My study now becomes a look at the way a particular grand narrative (Reformed tradition) is played out within two specific instances(congregations) and I suspect to show both form and variability, or if you prefer a renegotiation of the Reformed tradition in two different locations. The snag is of course although I am thoroughly Reformed, much of my knowledge of the tradition is tacit, this is not surprising, much of the tradition is spread tacitly. However I need to turn it into explicit knowledge. What is more as the part of the tradition I am interested in is the pragmatic part rather than the doctrinal, it is perhaps better to refer to this as Reformed Spirituality rather than doctrine. Snag, Reformed tradition is activist as such has a suspicion of spirituality which is often associated with more meditative/contemplative traditions. So it is not pick up half a dozen books and read, but a careful working through of Reformed classic, descriptive portrayals (both fictional and factual), reading prayers and sermons by particular leaders asking all the time “What does it say here about being Reformed?”

Friday I went to the woman’s night at Herringthorpe. It was a Wii night which nearly always embarrasses me as somewhere in the last twenty years I seem to have picked up some coordination that I lacked when younger, or other people have drastically lost theirs because I actually seem to do above average on them. A third possibility is the Wii was designed by geeks who set it for geek level coordination and everyone else is too coordinated.

Last two days have had a cough with a sore throat, which has kept me in, partly in an attempt not to spread it but also so as to keep the infection as short as possible. It may at last be on the withdrawal stage as I seem to be coughing less and I don’t think my throat is as sore. Surprisingly when compared with recent colds it has not landed me in bed for most of the day as well as the night. So I have been using it to get on the reading on the Reformed tradition. So far I have read “Letting God be God” by David Cornick and am reading “Living the Christian Life: A Guide to Reformed Spirituality” by Robert H Ramey Jr and Ben Campbell Johnson and “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson which is supposedly a letter written by an elderly Congregational minister in 1957 to his young son which tells his life story.

Normal weeks for the start of February

2011-02-13T10:58:00.000-08:00

I think this will be thematic rather organised by date. The really good news is that I have sorted my diary, it now seems to be functioning properly or it is doing until the University moves its diary system over to Google Apps. Mind you I came down on Friday evening to find two of the directors larking about with advertising merchandise from Google. I hope things stay sensible. Anyway as long as I sync’ my contacts at the same time and don’t try sync’ing two diaries at the same time it usually does not get into a huff.

I think I am settled down to the normal routine in work, it is funny but getting back and getting into my stride always takes longer than I expect. Most of my work at present is concentrating on getting the Butyrate paper ready for publication. I am not writing it but I am responsible for the graphs. I hope it comes out. Our conclusion is that the accepted norm is not proven. Indeed even to get the consistency we produce is dubious.The studies are not really comparable and their conclusions don’t agree. What we want to achieve apart from getting the paper published is for a set of more definitive experiments to be funded.

However due to a cold and then an interview for my thesis I then was not in work for very long that week. The interview was with a couple, both on their second marriage as their had both been widowed, who lived out at Maltby. He was a dyed in the wool congregationalist. As strong in that approach as any Presbyterian at St Andrews, while she was Anglican choir in background but had settled in Herringthorpe when her children were small as the local Anglican church had nothing for them. She was not the sort of person to sit on the side lines and was singing in Herringthorpe’s choir within a month.

Last weekend not only was i writing a paper for my next supervision (on small groups at Herringthorpe) but Stuart was giving me and Sarah and anyone who wanted it a tour of Western Park Museum. He was concentrating on the way that paintings are used among the displays to help people visualise what Sheffield was once like. However there was also a new exhibition called Sports Lab. Now normally I think this would largely be of interest to boys but this one included a dance game which I could see any dance minded girl enjoying. They had babies on it while we were there and they really did not get it. However I suspect a primary age girl with some dancing ability could get a really good display.

Sunday I was hoping to get to Herringthorpe for morning worship, church meeting and evening worship, In the end I only made evening worship, which rather conveniently was on not hurrying. Nor did I do any work on my paper but by then it was already clear I would have enough to write. Sunday evening services are bible study as worship. A fairly low key event provided you have a group who are willing to share the leadership and several musicians who will take it in turns to play.

Monday went to writers group and got a surprisingly positive response to the poem I took. Normally there are suggestions for improvement, but this time they seemed happy for it to stay as it was. Even asked whether I had intentionally based it around a sonnet form. No, I really should check what sonnet form is, it just was the form that was natural for that piece.

Wednesday was busy with both a research computing group and a post grad open day. I am afraid most people looking for postgraduate study assuming that IT is irrelevant to their application. Admittedly I did when doing my for Birmingham but then I expected and indeed use the systems at Sheffield. That however brought up a snag the one time in the year where we do get to give post graduates information is an afternoon at the start of term in late September or early October (last year 28th September, looks like 27th September this year ). I need to be around for that.

Thursday started collating the papers for my supervision together and sent them off on Friday having revised my essay. Last time there were relatively few; this time there were lots. That does not mean that last time there was little to talk about and this time lots, just that this time the topics to discuss are bitty so rather than having one big thing to discuss we have lots of little bits. Oh well I will have jumped through another hoop towards the PhD, basically this time give progress report. Did you know there is twice as much form filling associated with a part time PhD as there is with a full one. Someone needs to do something about it, the idea that part timers have that sort of extra time is ridiculous. When they allow up to update records online instead for these procedures then we will be onto a much better system. Oh and it is not necessary for me to review training and check progress separately.

Saturday was a day off, I did go into town, bought an audio extension lead a magazine and some food, then tried to make copies of recordings of interviews onto CDs. I found out why I have not been doing this as I needed the software to do it. So I bought the software only for two of the remaining three CDs to develop faults. So I have had to order more CDs.

Today Herringthorpe in the morning and then an unwind and relax the rest of the day. I will try and write an account of this morning in church but then to bed.

Bradford Shipmeet at the end of a normal week

2011-01-30T13:55:00.000-08:00

Right lets see about this weeks happenings. I am beginning to feel that I am settled back into what I need to do. I managed all four days at work this week without a migraine so it seems to have been the post Christmas blip that I have managed to throw off. On Wednesday in work there was an NVivo Users meeting. I am begining to realise I need to be more proactive in taking things to people. A research bid went in and because I had not talked to someone they had not put in the money for software and hardware plus personel to keep it running that they need to really run the software.

Another thing is I am learning that with another member of staff that when I was expecting her to take the initiative she was waiting for me to issue instructions. Bother. I can issue instructions but she really does need to be more instrumental in doing her job (that is organising and running computer courses). I am not pushy but I have been wondering why things have not been happening and it seems to be because I have not been suggesting dates. One of the problems is that she actually knows the demand while I don’t. Oh well I now have one arranged.

Another thing is I have my phone battery sorted. It has been running flat far more than it should have. In the end I needed to do several things. Firstly set up a sync properly, as it was trying and failing to sync. I then turned the frequency of syncing to daily and largely turned syncing off. I also got a larger battery, which means a chunkier phone but the battery now last about three days instead of less than one. I have tested that over the weekend and on Saturday it got a lot of work for me and still did the three days.

Even better news is that I saw the doctor on Friday and I no longer have a prescription for Paroxetine (Seroxat). I am on a really small dose at present 5mg having been tapering off for a long time (I think something like three years). 5 mg is really an irritating amount to be on as you need to chop tablets in half to get that amount. If I do go down after stopping I can go back on but the doctor thinks the present level is almost homeopathic it is so small so I do not expect to. Formally I will stop doing this on Wednesday.

Saturday I went to Bradford for a Ship of Fools Meet, in honour of Erin Etheredge(community editor on the forums who died just before New Year). We met at the National Media Centre and I got to seeing an Imax film for the first time with the film Wild Ocean ). It was spectacular although I came out with a headache. I found that although the initial images lept out at me, after a while my brain seem to process them as on a screen or a fish tank. Then we went onto Omar Khan’s for a meal. It was only a small crowd of us I think six people through out the whole event. I also went tee total for the event and that meant with getting back to Sheffield by about 10pm I was able to be functional today.

I was reading in church today. Normally when there is a version of the bible in the pews I use that one. However the version is the Good News and as part of my preparation I look up other versions and this time even glanced at the Greek. The reading was only 4 verses long 1 Corinthians 1:18-21 but I had at least three grumbles with the way it was translated. The deal breaker for me was the fact that they had changed the subject of the first verse. Not drastically admittedly but in a way that would have for the original readers weakened the force of what Paul was saying. The switch had happened from the fact Christ was crucified to the fact he had died. the others really were personal preferences. However this is of course Paul speaking about the wisdom of God being different from the wisdom of this world. Ironic that I am using learning to ask questions about the passage and find it wanting. However I take comfort from the fact Paul the writer is a trained scribe and not only that uses that knowledge to write this passage when he picks up the verse from Isaiah. In other words to read this passage correctly then it is not a rejection of worldly knowledge but a plea to understand its limitations. However it so happened that although the bible in the pews are Good News none of the readers used it today. The preacher read from the Bible she had with her which was probably the NIV, I read from the ESV and the third reader read from the NRSV because she had the beatitudes and could not stand using “happy” instead of “blessed”.

Settling into the New Year in Sheffield

2011-01-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

Last week was odd. I had basically thought I could do practical things far faster than I could in reality. So when Monday dawned I realised that I had a full morning of activity to get through and nothing was written on a major piece of work for my thesis. So at that stage booked the Tuesday off as holiday.

The piece of work got done by the Tuesday evening and was sent off to the proof readers. I then spent Friday working at home and going through the proof read pieces. It worked ok I think. It is one of the few pieces I know that will not be in any form in my thesis. Basically because I had to outline the argument in my thesis given the work I had already done. I will be interested to see if this counts as an argument rather than a series of ideas strung together.

Wednesday and Thursday were quiet in work. I was half expecting students to be back, or there to be a lot of conferences. Nothing in fact happened. I managed to deal with most of the queries that had arrived by email while I was off and I think dealt with one major one and started processing another. I found myself passing on what I would consider pretty basic stuff to an expert user. I wonder how he missed learning about those things. Some I think is that my brain just always worked that way and no I don’t trust myself to hand code things when a machine can do it for me.

Friday was actually fairly good but the effect of the unwinding of having submitted such a big piece was for me to throw a migraine. or I think I did, I was not fully functional on the Saturday although I was not curled up in bed. I also managed to spend a couple of hours in a book shop without finding much I wanted to buy. I somehow managed to take all my medication in the morning, which was not too bright a thing to do as some of it I am supposed to take before bed.There were plenty of books there so it was not lack of choice.

I went to bed early on Saturday and thought I had got over the mess only for a migraine to strike full blast Monday morning. However that does seem to have finally cleared whatever was causing it in my system and the rest of the week has been far better paced.

Tuesday I went down for a supervision to Birmingham, things worked smoothly until it was time to see my supervisor. Then there was some negotiation going on in Department and they wanted him down immediately for twenty minutes. These things happen about every nine months or so however it cut short the meeting by about twenty minutes which is better than some of these situations have been. However the supervisor thought what I wrote had the embryos of an actual thesis. Also checking for something else I came across the following quote “Culture - not vision or strategy - is the most powerful factor in any organisation”. This is from the book Cracking your Church’s Culture Code by Samuel Chand. It is American and it does presume culture is something the boss determines which does not fit with my understanding at all. However I suspect it would do no harm for a church secretary or minister to read it. For instance he points out that turf issues aren’t really about the tasks people fight over but that they are about personal pride and perceived powers.

Wednesday I had a long meeting on Wednesday morning and actually spent most of the afternoon going through the accumulated emails. The difference being from last week is that I was actually feeling as if I was getting on top of it. I also emailed the person in work in charge of running courses possible dates I could teach on. I am beginning to realise that at least as far as research training she is not a proactive about setting up courses. I am going to have to think about how I tackle this but it explains a lot. I can tackle this, this time, last time I was simply too depressed to do so, so courses did not happen.

Thursday another normal day in work. Saw a PhD student who is working on attitude to nature reserves in I suspect Malaysia. She always brings me treats, often milk chocolate that I give away or fruit. This time she brought home made sweets. It is so long since I have experienced my automatic gag in response to texture I was beginning to think that with cutting out milk it had got rid of it as I have eaten things where I would have expected the gag to play. However these although they look milk free hit it exactly.

Friday had a bit of a frustrating morning, a person with whom I have a long history of cooperation has a student doing a PhD. Now this should not be a problem but the student is falling into that grey category between where people make the grade and people don’t. The problem does not seem to be understanding or comprehension. If PhD were gained by written papers we expect she would pass but it isn’t and she seems to lack the spark that takes people beyond the taught course level. In the evening I went to have a meal with James and Jean Dickson. It was an enjoyable evening. The main course was ham with Inverness Sauce which was sharp and fruity jelly so worked well with ham.

Saturday was better this week. I went into town, I decided on a whim to buy myself a couple of extra thermal baselayers from Blacks as the Peter Storm ones they sell are so comfy. I managed to pick up one large and one extra small. The one thing I am not is extra small (although I quite probably would get away with medium. So there was a second visit down town to sort that. I also picked up my prescription from Boots. I had the review with the pharmacist and as it was a locum covering Saturday I had to explain that the fact it said my GP had not reviewed my prescription was due to my GP not ticking the box not due to the lack of review as there had been a major reduction in September in what I was prescribed. Stuart came around in the evening and he needs to do a tour for his NVQ and he can’t do a schedule one so would I mind coming up and he would show me around. I said yes but not until the week after this, but also suggested that he widened it to other people at church, not everybody but a small group.

Today I went to Herringthorpe and they had a church meeting. They seem to be slowly getting their head around the issues to do with finance and as a result there was more light in this church meeting. What I suspect they are really struggling with is not finance at all but the fact that the methods that kept a congregation of less than one hundred don’t work very well for congregations that are larger. For instance they need to be deliberate about things rather than leaving them to the natural flow of friendship. People will not know who every one is within a couple of months of joining the church. So how do people find who to talk to. For instance today Vicki (spelling is correct) was asking for people to help with next Sunday’s Homeless Cafe, but if I was new I would not know who Vicki was .

Reporting back on the festive season

2011-01-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

Lets see how I can do for a brief roundup. I left Christmas too late really or the snows just made everything that much more difficult. The fact that for two to three weeks I could not get to Herringthorpe meant that when I could I felt I should go there. This meant going to both the Cristingle and the Carol Service. That at least one week meant two services. The upshot of it was that I called off going to the works party. That did not mean an extra day off work but that I did not have the hassle of trying to organise myself to be on form for it. I am really getting to the stage where I feel that there is little point in my attending although I do still try to go for good form sake. I honestly would prefer to be managing the reception desk for the whole day than at the party.

The next day it was pack up and go to my parents. I aimed to be there about 6pm, but it was nearer to 7pm when I actually arrived. No the journey from Sheffield does not take long but I had so much to do. Not just collecting the car but buying too really big plastic boxes to put stuff in. I was so intent on buying the boxes I did not spot that they were on “buy one get one half price” which was nice. I have now found a place to store them in my flat. Hopefully both of them will only be needed at Christmas and I can get away with only one mid year.

The reason for the late arrival was my inability to get past Chesterfield, this despite having spent two years negotiating the back routes for my PhD. I guess I was cocky and I failed miserably until I just decided to follow the signs from Hathersage and stop being clever. No gritters this year although the car was less powerful than last (it was also smaller which in my opinion is a good thing) and I was not turning down the gears quick enough but there was little other traffic on the road.

The next day was quiet although I made the Christmas Pudding, however I spotted when I started cooking that the quantity of the packs of “150g pack Waitrose Soft Tropical Fruit Medley, roughly chopped” were not what I had bought but 220g pack. That’s odd I thought, then realised the stuff I was dealing with looked almost glace in texture. Brain starts thinking “They are treating this stuff differently to what they used to I really want the other stuff”. So I put in a full bag, as I am pretty sure that you get less genuine fruit per gram, but the fruit had poor flavour. Next year if I repeat the recipe I think I am going to have to buy other soft dried fruit and make the mix for myself.

The day started quietly, Dad decided that church was out as the streets were too icy to walk and car moving was not appropriate. However to get up to Cathy’s we would go in his car. That meant all sorts of fancy maneuvers as Dad would not countenance me parking in the slot of someone who appeared to be away on the day. Instead of which the position I parked in may have caused a neighbour to have difficulty in getting out but appeared to be the only other option.

Cathy had this year decided that Christmas should be lower key and that she was not going to fuss so much. The result was an overall much pleasanter Christmas meal. My MP3 player that has all the Christmas music on it decided to stop working. I don’t know if plugging it into a computer might bring it to life or if I just need to get on with it and buy a new mp3 player and speakers for next year. As usual we ran Irene home.

On the Monday I made a whiskey and ginger cake to this recipe, the thing is that you can either make that a mild ginger recipe by using fairly mild ginger or a strong ginger recipe by using strong ginger. Needless to say as it is me, I made the strong form. I also went shopping around Heatons. Not much was open but the Somerfield at Moor Top has been taken over by Co-op and this seems to have improved it. It was not bad before but the stuff was better displayed and more the range I am interested in. It also was distinctly different from the Tesco Metro just up the road at which I bought nothing.

On the Tuesday I was up to Drummore. The run was straight forward, and I went the south way around Manchester. I think now they have sorted the traffic problems around the Trafford Centre it is probably the better way to go. This time I missed the Old School House for Lunch and therefore had to continue onto Newton Stewart. I decided I might as well see what was open there and found that Cinnamon a local Christian cafe, book shop and grockle outlet, was open and selling home made soup. I’d prefer to shop there for Christian books than the local branch of CLC which is the best Sheffield now has on offer.

The big news from Drummore is the former Ship Inn is now a Thai Restaurant. This is really quite a daring experiment. Posh pub food (also served at the Ship Inn) is about as exotic as Drummore has previously got. The locals seem to be willing to give it a try but we did not over the holiday time.

The rest of the time passed fairly quietly, in part because I had to do a lot of reading for my PhD. I am trying to collate the ideas I have had over the last four and a half years and see if I can find a pattern/ range of themes or such that could be sorted into a thesis. It is not lack of ideas, plenty of them, as those who have read the papers I have written will know but it is actually trying to develop a rope out of all the different strands.

Also while I was there Erin from Ship of Fools died. The first inkling I got of this was actually on 2nd December. Morag had taken the two girls to the Quaker Meeting in Newton Stewart, and they had done Sadako, who tried to fold 1000 paper cranes, as part of her cure for Leukaemia caused by the bombing on Hiroshima. She folded 663 before she died. Folding the cranes became her way of fighting the disease. Cait wanted to hear the story. Now it is a sad story and I knew when she asked me to read it, that I did not want to. Nothing I could put my finger on so I read, and was in tears for the later part of the story. I presumed some displaced grief was being released and thought nothing more of it. The next morning on browsing the Ship of Fools forum I spotted a “Important -Please Read thread in Styx” apparently started by Erin. My initial response was “Drat what an awful time for them to decide to take the ship into dry dock”, but I clicked on it, only to find it was actually posted by her brother Jason as Erin had died on 30th December. From the sound of things it was pretty quick, Erin showing ‘flu like symptoms earlier in the day, before being rushed to hospital and dying on admittance. She was only 39.

Now Erin isn’t someone I would claim as a friend, she is someone I respected highly, but I did not personally interact with her. I am trying to sort that out, because people talk on the Ship of being scared of her. I think I can say that with me it was not so simple. I never felt the need to post things that drew her ire, I rather listened and learned about what was and what was not acceptable on the site. However I don’t think I ever did not post something because I felt it would annoy Erin. I usually did not post something because I felt that either others had said it better or that what I had written was rubbish. However she was deeply connected with the boards. In the early days she helped “save” the boards when under attack from an internet troll who had scuttled other boards. She developed ways of coping with trolls and other storms that effect all internet forum firstly on the fee paying boards and finally on the public boards. These methods largely work, ship-of-fools is neither a lovey-dovey strongly controlled coterie nor a boards continually caught up in cataclysmic wars. Through a range of methods including having ten fairly straight forward rules, having a place to take personal attacks and also a board dedicated to issues that people tend to talk past each other on, she helped create a place where discussion can happen. Some of these are taken up more widely. If a discussion board has clear published rules they often owe quite a bit of what is in them to Ship-of-Fools. Others are hotly debated, the Hell board for containing personal vindictiveness, is effective but many people seem to get confused by it. The instruction to “take it to Hell or shut up” seems to work better than the instruction just to “shut up”. Linguistically the places is rougher, but it is a bit like having something out with someone in front of a school forum where others can comment. It sorts the trolls from the merely inexperienced who want to learn.

Ship of Fools is also a community that knows it grieves well. That is it can handle grief and perform well during times of grief. This goes back to 2002 when Miss Molly died, if you doubt this read this . If you have the time, spend more time in Limbo and read the other threads to Gambit and Kenwritez. However it is a strange time, Erin was bigger than anyone else on the boards. She was present even when she wasn’t in the way people related and it is a complete surprise. I am not sure even yet that everyone knows who should.

I travelled back last Thursday, Mum and Dad were surprised to see me back around 4pm, but if I leave at around 10:00 a.m. then the journey between Stockport and Drummore takes until around 4pm usually. Gritters were out but again clear roads. Then on Friday came back to Sheffield via Fleur and Walters. They were kind enough to provide me with lunch which I appreciated, however Erin’s funeral was at 4pm GMT and although I was not going I hoped to be in the Ship-of-Fools cafe for the time, so I could not stop.

Yesterday was spent sorting things out, then installing software so I could access the work I have done over the holidays on PhD from my main home computer and then Stuart came around to catch up.

Today I attended Herringthorpe and so am back into life in Sheffield. I have a busy day tomorrow and probably won’t go back into work until Wednesday (taking an extra days holiday so I can finish what I need to write for this months supervision).

Busy week preparing for Christmas

2010-12-19T13:39:00.000-08:00

This last week included the carol service. The wreath was a big task again. Next year I am going to have to do things differently. Lynn and Sandra(twins) who pick about 50% of the greenery are away visiting Lynn’s daughter in Australia from November to January or February and then the greenery that is sprayed needs spraying in advance or spraying not using the aerosol paints we use at present due to the solvent. I suspect that what will be needed is a preparation day when others help collect and prepare the greenery, there might be other activities as well. The pictures come out far more blue than I recall the actual wreath being. It looked positively pink at the Carol service.

Having done this on the Tuesday on the Wednesday I threw a migraine. Al right I know largely why, not taking extra medication on Tuesday morning to prevent migraine and then not drinking enough water during the day.

With that over with I started to think earnestly about Christmas. Friday and Saturday I spent a lot of the time doing Christmas things like shopping. I had planned just to shop on Friday, but I realised part way through the day that I was not really up to finishing the shopping that I planned so decided to do the food shop at Waitrose the next day. I did however manage to make rum truffles by following a recipe and managed to up load all my essays to date for my PhD. That allows me to move them from my main computer to this one which I will take with me on holiday and also to print them out at work so I can read through analyse them and come back with some idea of what my PhD is actually about. I also managed to write a round robin (if you want to read it, it is the next post down, but there is nothing there that is not elsewhere and in more detail. I bought a pack of Christmas cards and will send these with the letter to a few people who I keep contact with at Christmas time.

Today I went to both the morning service and to the carol service. The carol service was better attended this year with about seventy people there. This still was not the packed church that they have at St Andrews Chesterfield and it was a far more traditional in its readings. Pauline decided to read a piece of poetry, it was a fun piece, but I am not sure it worked being read aloud. Maybe my writers group are getting to me, they always read poetry several times before commenting, or maybe it just needed a performance rather than a reading. The rhythm and the rhyme tended to drown the meaning for me. There was however a good group chatting around and having mince pies afterwards.

Christmas Round Robin 2010

2010-12-18T10:17:00.000-08:00

December 2010

This is just a quick note to stick in with the Christmas cards to let people know how life is going. The year has been busy, I have to keep reminding myself that I am trying to do 80% of a full time job and 50% of a full time degree and somehow those have to fit together. I basically get around to planning the University’s Advent Wreath after my December Supervision and Christmas happens after the carol service.

Health wise I am actually lots better this year. In January I had a resurgence of migraines so sat down and asked what I had changed. In the end all I could think of is that I might have with changing supplements slightly dropped my magnesium intake, so I went out and got some and the change started almost immediately. Since then other little things seem to have helped, changing to a quieter office (I had the choice of a noisier one or a quieter one and I had realised that if things got noisier I was in trouble), stopped eating prawns and some minor messing with other supplements. The net result is not only fewer migraines but I have substantially reduced the medication for depression.

Holidays are often taken up with doing PhD work but I spent almost a fortnight with my God-family in the Rhins of Galloway. As I go up there regularly and what we do is between family excursions is go for walks and explore religious sites often at the same time but interspersed with drinking lots of coffee and ginger-beer while eating chocolate. There is a lot of Christian sites covering the whole of Scottish Church history, from Pre-Celtic to the Covenanters. However although the big ones such as Whithorn are known many of the smaller sites are largely unknown. We decided to create a website that gives people information on both the sites and on the walks in the surrounding area.

I also attended a conference of the Society for Liturgical Studies. One of the problems with my PhD is there isn’t a developed academic community to talk to, so I end going to conferences that overlap with my discipline. A surprising amount of identity work is done around worship and sacraments in both my congregations. So I find myself regularly writing about liturgical events or discussing liturgical controversies. The Society was interesting to say the least, an organisation who expressed the desire for more Free Church liturgists to join, who defined liturgy in such a way that most Free Church liturgist would not be interested. They also kept referring to people from the Reformed tradition.

Otherwise I am as busy as usual, if anything work at the University is busier than it has been for a while. I am not sure if this is part of the University refocusing on research due to the economic climate or me being in better health so more pro-active.

Hope that you have a good festive season and that during next year the blessings outweigh the sorrows. With Love and best wishes, God Bless Jean

From a supervision to an Advent Wreath

2010-12-14T12:52:00.000-08:00

Lets see how things have been. I cannot remember back to the start of last week although I know the snow was still making travel difficult, indeed if you know where to look around here in Sheffield (i.e. below the normal snow line) you can still see traces of snow, not much, and the rain today has done something to get rid of the dregs but still there. Oh I got snow boots on the Monday which made walking a lot easier. Snow boots are fairly similar to walking boots but stiffer, lighter, warmer and with a better tread so less likely to slip. However at work someone recommended Yaktrax which you put on over shoes and have coils for gripping the snow

Wednesday I was down to see my supervisor. He had emailed me on Monday to say don’t come if travel is dicey. I was watching the weather but by Wednesday it had definitely started to pick up. I was also watching the trains through the website the Narional Rail Enquiries disruption page and spotted that alternate trains seemed to be having difficulty. As one of the delayed trains was the one I was planning to get, I was able to set out and get the train half an hour early which was only five minutes late leaving Sheffield but then behind a stopper to Chesterfield. This meant it was delayed by about half an hour, so I got in the time I would have otherwise. On the journey Derbyshire was thick with snow,with the ground all white up to Derby but after that you started to see tall grasses coming through the snow and such, by the time I got to Birmingham everything was outlined in white by frost not snow. It turned out that my supervisor was going on information from his sister. She lives east of Sheffield and the snow has been worse out that way. There is noticeably more snow remaining in Rotherham than in Sheffield at present. The supervision went well and though the journey back was delayed it was otherwise smooth, until I got to Sheffield when there was a huge queue for taxis so I decided to go for the tram. This meant a wait for the tram and cramped travel but I suspect the wait was shorter than it would have been for a taxi. Apparently a shooting star went over while I was waiting, unfortunately I was looking the wrong way.

Friday started with a departmental meeting. This meant I missed Broomhall Breakfast and had to do a quick-turn around at work to get there. The meeting was poorly attended I assume in part due to the snow. I started picking the greenery for the Advent wreath for the chaplaincy. On the evening I went up to James and Jean for a meal. It was a lesson in how badly Sheffield public transport was effected by the weather. I got to the bus stop shortly after 6pm and by 6:30 pm no 40 bus had been by. A full 120 had gone by and the 52 seemed to have sorted itself out but no 40. At which point I and a French Lecture caught a taxi that dropped him at Slayleigh Lane and then took me onto James and Jean. After that the meal was uneventful but a thaw had set in that day and I was slightly concerned that if the temperature dropped below zero, that the Close which my flat is on, would be inaccessible by car, as there were puddles lying in the snow on the road leading to it.

Saturday was busy. I needed to shop for bits for the advent wreath and other practical shopping. Then on the evening went to Herringthorpes Women’s Christmas Dinner. This year only a dozen attended compared with between twenty and thirty last year. Pauline dropped out at the last minute due to Alex being ill but one of the other ladies took her place. The chatter was general this year, about family and what was going on in each others lives. I got to here about NHS winter weather planning in quite a lot of detail due to sitting near two nurse-managers.

Sunday I made a strategic decision to stay at home on the morning as with all the time spent out over the weekend I needed some time in. I also had more greenery to get for the Advent wreath for chaplaincy. On the afternoon I went to Herringthorpe for their Cristingle service. The car park still had quite a bit of ice/snow on it as indeed had the pub the previous evening. About a dozen kids came to the service. A former scout master from the church brought his grandchildren so it was not just a selection of the usual suspects. At Herringthorpe they make up the oranges during the service including making the cuts for the candle in the top. A good atmosphere to it.

Yesterday was a fairly normal day in work except I went to cut more greenery for the Advent Wreath. This year on both Friday and Monday I have taken time out of work to cut the greenery, it means that I was not going out after dark to cut the greenery which I have done previous years. In the evening I went with my writers group to the Frog and Parrot, fortunately for us there was no DJ or live band that evening, just fairly loud background music. The pub was fairly busy when we arrived but quietened down as the evening went on and we continued to natter.

Today was the carol service at the University. I was again in charge of making the Advent Wreath. There had been communication problems in advance. I said Advent Wreath and I think they started looking for something about a foot in diameter with eighteen inch candles. What I was talking about was something six foot wide (the base is a metre wide) and has candles between 2 ft and 4 ft. It was not helped that they lost the candles and did not think to ask the office manager who knew exactly where they were. Anyway it all worked on the day as you can see from the photos. Next year I will have to plan the work flow differently as we can’t spray the greenery in the Octagon which means it will have to be sprayed, probably at St Andrews (hopefully outside in the garden at the back) on the Sunday. Lynn and Sandra who are half the team will also be in Australia so I need to do some thinking. However the comments were good, and there was an acknowledgement that something like that had to happen to create an atmosphere in that room. It was interesting that the party afterwards was quieter. I think quite likely as Will the former chaplain had felt the need for a Christmas party and I don’t think the present one does.