After Elder's Retreat

Right I am going to have to check my diary to see what I have done. Writers group has started and one of the others commented that I managed to write different poems about autumn, my response was that I have only written two to date, that hardly is an outstanding track record and I actually had more poems about winter. Having checked things over I find that the autumn poems are actually three, one of far lower quality than the other two. I have quite a few winter ones, a few early spring ones but I cannot recall any whose setting is summer. This is self explanatory to a certain extent, writers group tends to meet in Autumn, Winter and Spring and have holidays in Summer. Another writer asked how many poems I had written and excluding the very early ones with writers group where I was all over the place I have in the region of seventy poems.

Work wise i am busy with a variety of things. The building work got on top of me the week before last but a chance conversation with Peter led to me realising that part of the planning was that if it got too much for me I would work at home. So I decided to institute with the result that I worked at home for two and a half days last week. The result was that I was feeling a lot more rested and finding that I was not collapsing into bed every evening if I did not have to be out. Last Friday there was a course on supporting people doing statistics that I went on. It was interestings, not least because Andrew Mead was there, who I rightly guessed to be the son on Roger Mead, one of the Statistics Professors at Reading all those years ago and also an evangelist within the URC. I know he would not like the title evangelist as theologically that was not where he was at but he was active in setting up Trinity Lower Earley although as a lay person you will not read any of that in the official documents.

This week I think I have got myself talked into co-delivering a statistical course for linguists. This is aimed at staff and research students and is an applied course. In that the idea is to get people to The other person leading it will be from MASH. I invited her to sit with me when I started to advise someone. The first person who came (most have been repeats in the mean time) was a student from landscape. It was actually a design of a questionnaire question and so a single consultation but in doing that I was able to put in some useful things. He reported that what people said about me in Landscape was that I change the way they think about their research making it more rigorous.

Last weekend was a writing one, or what time I had when you took out shopping and so on. The result was that I was probably not spending enough time on the background to what I needed to write. I needed to pick up the use of flows within the social sciences. It is quite popular at present and therefore I could argue that I was working with a metaphor that other used and what I wanted to do was to explore it in a different way. This is far easier than it is to argue that a particular metaphor is applicable. Thus it gave me the transition to the interacting with the data from my ethnography and hopefully bring out something new. Actually it nearly always does bring out something new when you are looking at these metaphors. It is as if the metaphor allows you to see things differently from what you did before.

Yesterday I went to St Andrew’s Elders retreat. I will not be back serving until Easter time, when of course Sarah leaves. There are big in progress in South Yorkshire as the big churches start to lose their ministers. The model that is going is far more that of a cell church, with the local congregations being responsible for their meeting for worship week by week and ministers really functioning in an oversight role. There will be only two ministers in Sheffield when Sarah leaves although the hope is to recruit another although that one might well be inducted to the whole of Sheffield which should be interesting as who gets to issue the call.The situation with the chaplaincy is also interesting. I am not sure about what the resolution would be.

I suddenly had a brainwave last night and thought that what I would like is one place I could go to look at a variety of URC blogs. I recalled that something similar was done at work so did a hunt around and eventually came across NetVibes and I created this web page  . It is not complete but I am slowly collecting those I can find. If anyone knows of any others then please let me know. They need to be blogs clearly connected with the URC.

Today I went to church because I was doing the sound. It worked fine for me although I did put Sarah up slightly. The theme was musical as it was close to St Cecilia's day and therefore it was a good time to honour the choir and those who bring their musical talents to the worship of the church. However Sarah picked up a theme around musical harmony being a metaphor for church life that I had used in an article I wrote for the Messenger . Oddly enough Anne Cathel’s picked this up as being well written piece the previous day which was why I had just checked what I had written. Otherwise today has been fairly quiet.

Sore throat at Elders

Let me see. There are three events this week. First my writers group started up again. This is fun although we are already in the run up to the Off the shelf reading (It is free and all are welcome to come) which means I have to get two of my poems through another draft and ready to be read for a week on Monday. I probably should be doing them now but I will do it later this week.

Second was that I presented my report to elders on Thursday. It was one of those days and not helped by the fact I awoke with a sore throat. I also forgot to ring the minister to remind him I need to projector and screen. Actually everything otherwise went like clock work except I talked too much, saying some things earlier than I should of and having to repeat them. For the first part of the elders meeting they had a local councillor in talking on ways they could engage with the local community. Why is it that councillors think we should always engage with the homeless. I agree it is a good work, but this is a church already involved in Pathways and other homeless activities and really needs to find places where it can build relationships which will make it more outwardly focused. Its not at this stage about evangelism its about making friends on an ongoing basis. This is just something that have not bothered to do. The one really useful comment was by Helen who said that the majority of the serving elders now were incomers. Very interesting, I had not worked that out before, it shows as she said that the incomers were able to tap into with the powers that be when some of the local people weren't.

Unfortunately I still had a burny throat that evening and decided it was time to call the cold, a cold. Friday we were supposed to have Greek but Betty had just died and Sarah wanted to go up after the Broomhall Breakfast to see what she could do. With that and my cold greek was cancelled. So I nipped into town to get supplies and since then have been trying to hibernate. Unfortunately needed to go out to St Andrews today to set some of the heating (the rest can wait until I am better but the evening service today and the Tuesday group were likely to need the heat on before then). The rest has been sleeping, keeping warm, ginger drink which is supposed to be good for indigestion but also seems to do pretty well at relieving cold symptoms, taking vitamin C and zinc and echinaea plus having an essential oil warmer going with eucalyptus etc in it. Basically I have thrown everything I can at the cold and it is only shifting slowly. So I think I am going to be off work tomorrow but hoping I am back to functioning normally by Tuesday. Voice has gone today so it might be interesting informing people of my status tomorrow.