A good end to a busy week

This past week there has been no shortage of news most of it pleasant so don’t worry there is plenty for me to write about.



Monday it was my writing groups bi-annual assessment. It went very well I think. We met in the Elders room. The way we sat meant that Jenny, I and Margaret were all sitting together. The assessor is a published poet so our tutor had chance to show off the group. Jenny is quite a mature poet and indeed has had several poems published, I am not claiming the same for myself but I did a quantum leap with my ability just before Christmas so I am a good person to demonstrate improvement. Finally Margaret is in the final stages of writing a book, it is the one book we all want to read. I don’t suppose it is my normal style, welsh dark gothic in style but the twists and turns are quite incredible. So she was good to show off the standard of prose that is achieved by the group.


Tuesday was just bible study,  They got onto the validity of infant baptism. Now a days I don’t particularly go into the rights and wrongs of it, but I grew up with the arguments.  One guy decided to be adamant of that adult baptism was the only answer, so I said that there was other opinion and that it could be argued as well. I got him to admit that the New Testament did not state categorically either way.


Wednesday was NAG meeting and I presenting what work had been done so far. It went well with people wanting to talk about things. I sensed a real enthusiasm in the group for the route we have mapped out. I presented a shortened version of the form today. What was interesting was that most people queried area even though we had not done a precise area decision. The area was sort of “around the church”, rather than “in your local urban priority area” which is about a mile away. Talking today I sense that we are only starting from scratch because previous projects have not really considered fundraising as part of the project. They seem to have had a contact centre which firstly the church lost control of because the funding came through the probation service and secondly when the funding ran out the probation service just shut it. This seems to be a repeated pattern for their community work. With some the grants needed to make it successful would have been minimal e.g. a regular sum towards the provision of taxi services for elderly people so they could get.


Thursday  was quieter than expected because the youth group found that most of its members were away in Oxford. However I spent the afternoon helping to run a stall for the department on a university Open Day. Even though I was on the grave yard shift, we still had a number of inquiries including one from a mother whose son had lost the stuff he had collected and wanted fresh but did not dare come and ask. He will have to get out of relying on mum to pick up the pieces pretty quickly if he gets to University. Actually for awhile I have noticed that students tend to come in two forms to University. There are those whose behaviour and dress suggests that they are still children while others seem to be full adults. I am not sure what the underlying cause is of this marked discrepancy.


Friday was a full day in work, or would have been if time of the month had not intervened. That said I was up and functional by the afternoon. I needed to sort out the stuff for a course I am doing on Monday and to do that I needed to talk to a couple of people in the building where my office used to be. This was fortunate as there was yet another burst pipe on Glossop Road, they seem to happen every summer just when the weather is at its warmest. This one meant that there was no functional toilets. So the trip over to the other building was chance to go to the loo. Oh in the hot weather I have been making strong mint and green tea and cooling it. By strong I mean very strong. When cold it can either be drunk 50/50 with lemonade or in a mix with wine and tonic water. Both are delicious and cool tasting.


Saturday, hmm was quite a day. I started the fairly early, probably because my body registered that it had a lot on that day. Before 9:00 a.m. my doorbell went and a postman announced that he had a parcel for me. This surprised me, as normally I have some clue when I am due to get a parcel, but there was no hint of anything. However I let him in to the block and he brought a parcel up to my flat. It was addressed to me. What is more it contained a mju tough 8010 camera.. I certainly was not expecting that! I hunted for documentation and found a letter from   Merrell; only then did I remember that when I had bought a pair of shoes a couple of months back I had filled in details and agreed to go into a draw. It appears I was runner up! I thought that was always something that happened to other people.


However I did not have time to set it up because I was off to “Fun at the Fair” at Herringthorpe. It was an attempt to do something different with a summer fair. Basically combining it with a fun day for families. The weather was superb, perhaps slightly too much breeze towards the end. They had also managed to persuade a Mums and Tots group that use the premises to have a stall. The Brownies and Guides both had stalls and I think the scouts did but that was very token. There was a good mix of church and non-church families just sitting around. Improvements would be things like, making the fund raising fifty-fifty for groups, also developing a range of cheap have a go games, with small prizes such as ping-pong balls into jam jars, or the old fishing game or drop a 5p on a £1 at the bottom of a bucket of water. Rotherham has an odd feel. I am trying to place why the fact that its urban deprivation feels worse than that of Sheffield or Chesterfield. Some of it is easy, the railway station is a dive, for starters; just beside it is a river with a chantry chapel and a historic pub. The sort of place most towns would spend money on developing as fashionable pub. Admittedly Tescos did it no favours with their warehouse of a supermarket being built alongside it but in other places that simply would not have been allowed. The town centre is dominated by the Minister but if you are outside Rotherham you would hardly know it. But these are symptoms rather than causes.


Today it was off to church at Herringthorpe and then church meeting. Pauline put in a reference to “We limit not the Truth of God” by George Rawson. I commented to her that that seemed rather appropriate as today is the 4th July! For those who don’t get the reference the hymn she is quoting is a paraphrase of Pastor John Robinsons address to the Pilgrim fathers when they left Plymouth. At coffee I bough a bar of Traidcraft Organic Dark Chocolate which is seriously yummy. Actually one of the things with being involved in the Needs Assessment Groupis that in giving the report I got response from people I would not otherwise have got, including stories of previous community outreach. After that I came home and slept!


This week is quieter, yes I know that is not going to be exactly difficul., I am teaching tomorrow and am running a brainstorming session for the youth group on Thursday. I hope I can be back to my normal car by then. Then at the weekend I am attending Fleur and Walters Ruby Wedding and then spending the weekend with my parents. I must look up trains for that soon.

A warm week in Sheffield

Monday was a relatively quiet day, writers group in the evening. It felt wrong to be coming into a quiet building because no jugglers were meeting. There were three things on the go with the group. One was the actual class, another is the preparation for the observation and the third is preparing the book for publication. I have said I will do the layout. a bit of cheating and some knowledge of Microsoft office should not make it too arduous. Margaret one of the group is just finishing a novel which in my opinion is by far the best writing in the group. Her biggest challenge is to get it sent off to an agent over the summer rather than decide on yet another re-write. I am pretty sure there will be agents willing to take it. In fact I suspect all the group want to buy a copy already and will be really disappointed if it isn't published. We are discovering more and more twist and turns to the story each week and we would love to know how they all fit together.

Tuesday was an NVivo day as there was a query about why a certain files would not open in it. I eventually discovered that it was to do with memory management but my own machine is playing up. I am not quite sure what with at the moment but it managed to corrupt at least one programme while I was sorting it. That is a file went missing for some reason, I suspect the computer tried to overwrite it but did not do it properly.  After work I got my haircut. My hairdresser agreed it had gone wild. Will people with curly hair who think this does not happen to people with straight hair please take note. Then on the evening I went to Herringthorp for Bible Study. Whereas St Andrews Sheffield seems to go for husbands always sitting with wives, Herringthorpe goes for men on one table and women at another. I also am realising my understanding of prophecy is significantly different to what some people at the church would hold. I am not sure that you tell true prophets by the fact their prophecy comes true, or that a person who is a prophet only is so occasionally. It seems to me that while coming true is a criteria it is only useful for short term prophecies, secondly that if I wanted to fool someone creating a short term prophecy that came true is fairly easy. The question that is more important is does this fit with God as we understand God to be. Hmm something to think about there.

Wednesday was a relatively quiet day. At work I went and sat down with the reviews of a papers that had been rejected and tried to work out why. The first thing that was clear was that we were not sending it to the wrong journal. Rather it seems that the problem was that because we were sending it to a journal that is outside the normal range where this research group sends papers, we had not made enough adjustment to house style. Specifically we had not actually read around the literature enough and we had also not been clear enough in our explanation of what was being done. It was very clear that the reviewers were making mistakes due to not understanding what was happening. In the evening I did a Waitrose shop. As a treat I bought a packet of Gingerbons which are delicious ginger flavoured gums. The company obviously knows how tempting they are because they are individually wrapped in wrappers that take some opening. I gave up trying to open them with my bare hands and used scissors instead.

Thursday morning was relatively quiet as far as I can recall, I wrote my findings on the paper to the main author. Then it was off to TFR at Church House in Rotherham. TFR is an organisation funded by the Anglican and Methodist Churches to enable involvement by the Faith sector in regeneration. Herringthorpe found them and managed to persuade them to provide an advisor while it goest through the process of analysing needs in the local community. This started out under the Buildings Group when they were thinking of going for public funding. I suspect that the advisor thought he was dealing with people who were doing this sort of thing for the first time. In actual fact he was dealing with me and Sue Ball who was a health visitor, did her masters at some stage and is now part of the management at the local health authority. So neither of us were exactly beginners. It showed, we came with a research proposal and were able to answer the questions he threw at us. The effect of asking directly about funding for the second part of the project was for Mark to have fourteen possible sources for such funding according to what we decide is necessary. Now we need to take the proposal back to the NAG meeting next Wednesday.

Friday I had a late start, the effect of the previous afternoon was that I was fairly tired and certainly was more than ready to go back to bed after going to the Broomhall Breakfast. I also needed to start putting together the slide show for the NAG meeting and I needed to write up last Sundays worship as I had not found time earlier in the week. Oh and I did type faces for the writers group publication. I have I think put out a mix, Two serif, two san serif and one modern. For those who think modern is going to be something like comic sans, forget it, its a halfway house between serif and san serif. Oh and none of these were fancy fonts.

Saturday I went shopping in the morning, I was up pretty promptly and in Jones Shoe shop before 10:30 a.m. The result of which is that I got a pair of semi smart sandals with low heals. There is very little with low heels this season and I was wondering whether I would have to buy a summer shoe instead. However I found a pair which have the straps interweaving a bit like celtic knotwork designs. They are pretty comfortable and look summery. I also shopped for the stuff for the brainsorming session I am hoping to run for the youth group on Thursday. I am hoping there are not more than ten of them at the group or I am going to have problems with the equipment. Came home and finished off the Presentation for the NAG meeting on Wednesday. One of the issues we have to get the rest of the group to understand is that there is no way Sue and I can do the first part of the research on our own. I am thinking that as it is a group of about 8 people and we want to do about twelve interviews, doing one or two each would be fair. We are giving people three open ended questions to ask. Actually there are two reasons for this which have nothing to do with Sue's or my time: firstly I want people to get a feel for what other people are saying and talking to them is the best way to do that; secondly I want people to build relationships with people outside the church who are involved in working with the community. However I also want them to see what is reasonable and what isn't.

Today I did not go to church. With three evenings at Herringthorpe this week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday plus how tired I was last night and I still needed to write up Tuesday's Bible study. It just felt as if I would be better in this morning. I just felt off colour, nothing that a couple of extra hours in bed did not put right. So I got up wrote up Tuesday's bible study and then went and had a shower. It is really good to have a shower in the middle of the day with the warm temperatures that are around. I have since had lunch, created a front cover for the writers group book and written this.

Holidaying followed by a busy week

Lets me assure you it has not been laziness that has kept me from
writing for the last couple of Sundays. The first one was a blazing
hot day and I with Cait and Jenny were scrambling up and down cliffs
trying to find St Medan's cave. We did not find it and there is no
real sign of the path. The next stage I suspect is to try and find it
from the sea but that will be a few years into the future. Last week it was simply writing for supervision that kept me from writing here.

So lets me start with describing my holiday. I hired a Corsa, a far better size of car than the car at Christmas. It actually took a huge amount of stuff, although Jenny complained that she was short of space in the back of the car. Given that when I was her age my parents owned a Renault, I did not have much sympathy, plus its purpose was to get me around. One snag with the car is that someone (I suspect a previous hirer, had polished the windscreen with car wax, Tony did a marvellous job of getting it clean after I drove through a flock of suicidal flies just outside Manchester, the wipers would not touch the mess). Actually I think the modern Corsa has replaced the Astra as my favourite car to drive, despite having reverse in the wrong place. The decrease in size makes it more moveable and therefore I feel more in control. It has good viewing as well.

Wigtown Monastory site
Originally uploaded by jengie@btinternet.com

Morag seems to be doing well, and thoroughly enjoying her work as a
walk organiser (I think it is one of three jobs she holds down but I
heard little of the other two). Mostly she worked in the morning and
then came out with me on the afternoon. Sometimes we did bits of
things that helped her as a walk organiser on the afternoon but I bet
she did not count these into her working hours.

On the afternoon we would meet up somewhere, normally a coffee shop and then go and explore somewhere. At the start we were travelling further afield than
we normally do, going for walks in the area of Stranraer and even
spending one day over on the Machars going as far as Whithorn, but as
the week wore on we settled back to doing very local things. A couple
of decent walks from Chapel Rossan bay, one with Dora their dog and
the rest of the family and one on our own. I think we visited
everywhere we normally do except Kirkmadrine and we were in Logan
Gardens only for coffee (two days running).

The weather was glorious, nine dry days and two mild showers on the 10th. The down side to being in Scotland when the first good weather of the year occurs is that
that is when the farmers make their first cut of silage. Now I suspect
from my point of view the problem is not the fact that they are
cutting silage but it is the first cut and that is known to release
all sorts of things into the air, more so than second or third. Well I
was on hayfever treatment for about three days then the silage was
mainly in and I did not need the treatment. On the Saturday we went to
Port Logan and had a go at geocaching. We failed I think because we
were climbing over the rocks too much and not enough looking for loose
rocks near the path. The girls are growing up but not yet at the stage
where their mum and I are too boring to be seen with. No doubt it will
come. Although Dora the dog seems to think that the pack is complete
if I am there and she has to herd me in. She is a bearded collie but
shows most signs of having gun dog instincts, only she does not wait
for the bird to be shot before fetching and so far they have all
escaped to sea. However if she ever turns up at Sheffield having run
away I will know why. This set on Flickr contains most of them, there
are some duplicate pictures I have not bothered putting up but
otherwise that is most of what I took.


Since then I have had a busy week. Al; right so Tuesday was over
written with a migraine, except I managed to get to a meeting with Sue
from Herringthorpe who is chair of the Needs Assessment Group(NAG).
Made too important decisions, firstly that neighbourhood meant
immediate area of the church not including a more deprived area about
a mile away as yet. The reason was two fold. Firstly the realisation
that if the church did take on that area, they would have to do
something based in that area they would have to do something that
either meant deliberately going into the area or they would have to
bring people to the church, plus there is a cultural difference
between church members and people in this area. None of this would
matter if they were enthusiastic about community work, but as yet I
have no sense of real enthusiasm and I do not want them to overreach
themselves by taking on a challenge they are not up for. The other
thing was to use "loneliness" as a theme for something the
congregation may know how to tackle. Hmm not sure I should be doing
this but if this project is to get off the ground and church meetings
decision is that it should then decisions like this need to be taken.

Wednesday I was back in work and life did not stop while I was on
holiday. I found someone wanted to see me, and several other bits of
work needed doing. However one thing is that I am moving offices again
and expect to move again in six to eighteen months time. This time it
is back to 289 Glossop Road, top floor, quiet with quite a bit of
space (it used to be a 2 person office). Actually if I am honest the
move is just in time, as I am finding the main office of the computer
centre more and more distracting as I try to work at present. I
presume due to getting better but I don't like moves. I was offered
two other spaces but those would have been worse than my current
space.

Friday I started putting up a shelf over my bed (when I told Dad
earlier he automatically heard bookshelf). The reason being that while
I was away I found myself quite naturally saying evening prayer if the
books were on a bedside table by my bed. The nearest I can get for a
bedside table is a shelf, so I have now put up a shelf. It is
horizontal (near perfectly, i.e. I cannot tell the difference with a
spirit level). That said the first hole I drilled was a failure and
had to be filled in again and the rawplugs that came with the
attachments were useless. I ended up using some I bought and they
worked perfectly. The final hole I drilled worked fine. I learnt a lot
about drilling into walls and breeze blocks in doing it. Also over the
weekend got the papers ready for the next supervision.

Saturday ended up shopping at the same time as James and Jean, each
time we went out separate ways in the supermarket we ended up meeting
up again. If you want to know why I was wondering around in such an
odd manner I was looking for a hook to hang something from. Most
people use them for tea towels, I wanted it for a light cross as I did
not fancy banging in a nail just below my newly hung shelf. A thing
that Safeways used to have in, but I could not find anywhere in
Waitrose. Hence madly wandering up random aisles with a trolley load
of shopping. I will have to try Maplin next. I also sent out my
supervision papers to my supervisors.

Today due to time of the month I decided to skip morning worship and
only go to evening worship. I am going to have to debate with myself
whether that is a good idea. Not because I found them manipulative or
high powered charismatic, anything but. For those that remember
Parrswood Evening services during August, that is what the strongly
reminded me of. For those who wondered why I was nervous of
Herringthorpe, please understand this, it was not finding something
different, but finding myself at home that scared me, and that is what
I did tonight, liturgically I was at home, the people might be
acquaintances but the style, the manner and the content were familiar.
The familiarity of that service was unnerving, the problem is that
every time I find 'a home' in many senses then I have to move on from
it. Moving on is difficult, the more I do it, the less I like doing
it. I do not want to be drawn into the feeling of home, just to have
to leave it, and with this being a study placement I know now I must
move on in just over a years time. I learnt that my supervisor was
busy on Thursday (well all next week) and that we should really
rearrange. The thing is that if I had known it was for the week after
next I would have timetabled myself differently i.e. had this weekend
as a writing weekend and enjoyed the bank holiday.

Also before I forget I have started a Twitter account, no I am not
asking you to subscribe, it is pretty inane, being comments mainly
about what I am doing. However if at any time you want to check how I
am because you are concerned then have a look at it. It can be seen by
any of the following methods:
1) Look at my chattering blog and it is in a box on the left hand side
2)On my webpage http://www.jengiejon.info
3)On my Facebook wall you will need to be a friend of mine on
Facebook to see it but if you have a facebook account and want to be
just let me know.
4)Or if you have a twitter account follow jengiejon on Twitter.
So lots of ways. The reason for using twitter is it allows me to put
one message in lots of different places and therefore I hope people
who want to know how I am can find at least one of them.