Bradford Shipmeet at the end of a normal week

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”.

including a Liturgical conference

Panorama of mirfield
Originally uploaded by jengie@btinternet.com

Checking back over my twitter feed I see that the parentii were watching “Last of the Summer Wine” last week. I suspect it is on this week as well so they will not be ringing me until 8p.m. so this may well be written before they ring despite my late start.

Last Monday I heard that I did indeed get the concession, so I only have to pay half fees this year again. Yes! The day actually filled pretty quickly, partly as it was my only day in work this week and partly because my brain clicked into write mode with the Butyrate project and I wrote up most of what I needed to do. Also that evening my mind also sorted out what slides I needed to have for the conference. So a good day. I did not shop as I was away the rest of the week so the evening was free to think on the paper.

Leaving at 11:00 a.m. is civilised as it gives you plenty of time to pack. Unfortunately Kirkgate Station Wakefield is not civilised. The standard method of finding what platform your train leaves from is to ask the guard on the next train to come in. Seriously for those who have the choice of changing trains at Kirkgate or Westgate in Wakefield go to Westgate. Kirkgate was not the best of stations in 1977 and it has gone down hill from there. Fortunately the only smartly dressed people at kirkgate station were heading for Mirfield.

At the conference I was put into the retreat house. This was a good idea as the retreat house keeps silence from about 9pm to 9am as it is part of the abbey. It also meant more walking, and a continual job of educating the organisers that those in the retreat house needed extra time to get places. Turning up late was common place.

The conference itself was the sort confusing. The people were predominantly from the churches with set liturgies. This of course meant that the main interest in liturgy was critical and historical. I of course came from the sociological perspective but probably more importantly from a free liturgical tradition. That means that what I am used to is talk of what makes for good liturgy over a far wider range of topics. I think the thing that high lighted this for me, was a talk by an Anglican on the Anabaptist daily prayer book  where he mentioned that they had poets, musicians and Biblical Scholars right in from the start as well as liturgists and my response was “Of course you do!” I have written two  entries on my musings blog. However I have a third concern and that is the taking of Reformed thinkers out of context. A statement by a Congregationalist that for some people the main concern in worship is faithfulness to tradition and for others it is relevance, is not a statement about whether people have a written liturgy or not. You need go no further that Scotland to find excellent counter examples. The Wee Frees are totally about tradition but have no set liturgy, while Iona Community is strong on relevance and is producing liturgy all the time. Actually it gave me a weird sense that I as a lay Reformed person was about twenty years ahead of the conference. The things they were talking about were often part of the assumed structure within the URC. It was not helped by the fact that the one comment on my paper showed that I also outpaced one of the leading members in divinity, and I did not have time there to take her through all the problems I could see with her perspective. She was making logical leaps that were not possible to make from my paper. The assumption the Jesus learnt basically does not necessarily imply an adoptionist Christology. My own stance is that Jesus knew as a human according to his human nature and knew as God according to his Godly nature. (if someone recognises that quote and can tell me where from I would be grateful) Therefore as a human he learnt, because learning can not be easily separated from human development. I suspect that the God-nature was present but as an extreme form of what some introverts experience, where they seem to pick up what is going on for others around them very easily.

The net effect for me of these things was that my brain went into ethnographer mode and that takes me into a state where I overload fairly easily. By the time I came to talk to the conference I had a second paper that was a direct response to the conference germinating. I am still not sure what to do about it. However that made me highly nervous as there seemed to be so much ground that needed covering before my paper could even be read. In the end I just gave it. I tried telling the story but it did not work my brain was too full of the facts of what really happened that these undermined the telling. Anyway the paper is distributed and I will need to re-write to try and interact with the audience. This means taking things back a couple of stages and arguing that everybody does work around worship not just those who right the text. To understand a liturgy therefore you need not only look at what is written but what happens and what people understand to have happened.

Friday I was exhausted, but I also know that a couple of books had come to work, and that I needed to shop. I had ordered the books to arrive before I went to Mirfield so that I could take time out from the conference theme. One was the Non-designers design Book by Robin Williams which is very readable and I think worth reading. I got it as I was doing layout of the next collection of work for my writers group. Anyway I got into work and there were not two parcels waiting for me but four. One I left in work as it is almost certainly a book I ordered for work through Abebooks and got from Bristol Oxfam! Well it was a fairly obscure Statistical Text.

The actual text for the collection arrived Friday evening. I forget how addictive layout is and it was after midnight before I got to bed. I had just sussed how to get the stuff from Word to Publisher effectively. Although I Office 2007 was a major redesign for Word and Excel, Publisher is still very definitely Office 2003 style, which made it interesting to use. Some fairly obvious shortcuts were simply not implemented and it did not handle overflow well. Neil the teacher for the group had claimed that layout would take a long time. I am pretty sure it does if you approach it the way many people do, which is to take the different texts with all the formatting and try and create a uniform version. I did the opposite. I got rid of 90% of the formatting that was already there, then put in a fresh lot. There are still some fiddles but these are minor compared with working the other way.

Today went to Herringthorpe. It was a double baptism, the last as part of the main morning service. Pauline took the baptisms and then returned to the manse as Alex, her husband, had only come out of hospital on Friday after major surgery and was still far from well. So she wanted to be there to make sure he was alright. Roy Roddison took the rest of the service, and I was doing the reading. I got a couple of compliments on how I did it, which I expected. That is not vanity, I don’t feel that I read exceptionally well, just that I know if I prepare a passage, I will read it so that it is audible and with expression. I know about sound systems, I have been reading in church since I was ten, I have had numerous trainings and I actually focus on communicating what is going on in the passage while reading it rather than “me reading”. I am not sure why this stands out but it does because I regularly get the feed back that it does.