At the end of Low Week

Monday I spent the day with my parents, Dad has a long history of wanting to stay at home on bank holidays. On Saturday his watch stopped working. Throughout Sunday he was regularly asking my mum the time, he was not going to accept either my Mum’s watch which is one on a chain or my gran’s old wrist watch even if it was just to wear around the house. I suggested that we should go into town on Monday to get him one. His first objection was that the shops would not be open. When he got told to stop talking nonsense shops had been open on bank holidays for years, his ruse went to the weather which did not have a good forecast, even though I offered to drive the car down. In the end I spent some of the morning sorting Dad’s computer, not that there was much wrong. One task was to try and get linkedin to work for Dad, in doing so I am realising how big an education task the URC has. There are good Reformed sites out there, take Reformed Worship for starters but just because a body had “Reformed” in its title does not mean that I or my father want to align ourselves with it. The Reformed Theology Institute) is one case where I am wary. The theology there is Reformed but it is largely of the very conservative sort. However a number of URC people seemed to think it was a good idea to sign up to that group on LinkedIn.

Tuesday was a day I missed due to a migraine. My cleaner was due to come when she discovered I had a migraine was happy to come on Thursday instead. It through me slightly in that it largely affect my tummy rather than head but as treating it as a migraine cleared it, I am presuming it was.

In work this week I finished the next draft of the NVivo document. I must admit I still have one or two bits to add, but I think the most important thing now is to for me to put together the first of the videos. This is going to be one of the few that involves both teaching and also using the software, it is not the first of the videos in order. I will also need to keep it short and I have had to order a book to do it. Otherwise I am teaching myself confirmatory factor analysis as I really need to start encouraging people who are dealing with scales to use that technique when appropriate.

Friday I went to the breakfast, there were only forty there but as the volunteers were down because it was so far out of University term the kitchen was busy, also Sarah was away with it being the week after Easter. Fortunately Joshua was there and he really keeps things tidy in the hall when he is. It was also obvious when I was there that there was help needed to get the hall s straight. Particularly as the Ethiopian Orthodox church which hires our premises was celebrating Good Friday. They wanted to be in from 10:00 a.m. or earlier but as breakfast serving only stops at 10:00 a.m. that was not possible. Fortunately people decided to leave slightly earlier this week than last week and two of the regulars Dave and Peter stayed to help clear, so we were clear by 10:30 a.m.

I then spent the rest of the day working on my location chapter, I have sent it to my supervisor and I hope it does not need another draft. On the other hand I am realising that I am beginning to know what theory I need to put into my chapter on community. I also found that I am better concentrating on editing if I have music on in the background. Saturday and today I have spent time writing up another section on my community chapter and I am beginning to know what theory I am going to put into the chapter, there will need to be bits on system theory and on organisational anxiety, something on ordinary theology. Then need to make it clear how these feed into the flows of the congregation around of themes. Also start to move to the way the congregation addresses people.

On Friday evening I went up to James and Jean for a meal. It is a very good relaxed evening and one I look forward to. They are going up to Melfort next week, this time without the family, but their daughter and family have managed to find a house fairly close to them and thus the family is getting more and more settled in Sheffield. Just hope that their son-in-law finds a post in this country soon that is an easier commute than Cork.

Today for the first time I was back on the sound system, this might have been slightly earlier than attended but John a church member has had stroke and though physically he seems not to have too much problem it has affected his memory and he is certainly not well enough to do it at present. Any way it was not until I got to working the system that I realised that people had been trying to get it right and thus fiddling with the levels, only they kept turning things down. I was therefore tuning it during worship, it appeared that the preachers diction improved when in actual fact I was upping the treble and mid so as to remove the bass boom that the system had developed. The preacher managed to choose three songs from Common Ground, one of which we did not know and the theme of his sermon was anniversaries. That said doing the sound almost means I am slightly disconnected from the actual meaning in the service as I am concentrating on whether I can hear what is being said.

On a Spring Sunday with mixed weather

Monday was writers and I took the poem I had taken two weeks ago because I had done quite a bit of work on it. This time they felt that it was getting closer to finished and I don’t think I will need to take it back again. I am not sure whether I will manage to get something written up this week, but we shall see. While on writing I have found out there are books about writing writing faction so I have ordered one and I will see if it will provide me with any further good advice for writing my thesis.

However with the business of the week meant that Thursday which I had officially as a day working at home I awoke with a migraine, well I knew I was going down with one on Wednesday evening when I started craving ginger and feeling very very tired. I assumed that like the one or two immediately prior migraines that if I slept for an extra hour or so I would be fine, and as I was working at home this was workable around. However it was a full scale one, the morning was a washout though I did get up about 11:00 and the afternoon only really started working about 4:00 p.m. so I ended up just doing the stuff I had to do for work. The migraine had an after effect so I felt off colour both on Friday and Saturday morning but after naps on both days recovered enough to cope. On Friday I suppose I should admit to also having the unorthodox lunch of chocolate brownie, pineapple and ginger beer. These are actually the things I crave when I am semi-migrainey. The ginger beer makes sense but the rest does not although I have long known if I am to function with a migraine strong coffee, pain killers and ginger beer make a pretty good combination. I will only do that however if essential as it will delay rather than cure a migraine.

Also on Thursday my freezer decided it was time I defrosted it. It is a hard working machine and has been working now for around thirty years. My grandparents bought it back before I went to University to store bread in, in case they could not get to the shops one week. My sister inherited and then I did. The ice was such that the door was not closing properly. However having defrosted completely, it looks as if everything is back to working properly.

Friday morning Cliff came to the breakfast and then we installed metal boxes for the sound system. The Oratorio Chorus had managed to break a second plastic one, so we are seeing if the metal ones will last longer. The question is whether they will break the box or manage to work the screws out of the dais with the weight they put on the boxes. James had managed to send me the proof reading of the chapter on location, so I edited that up during the day. That evening I had a good night out at the Dickson’s, I can’t remember anything in particular coming up but it was a pleasant evening.

Saturday was spent on doing bits a pieces for thesis, sending off papers for supervision, starting the next chapter, and trying to plot it out. I am making slow progress with it. I think I have sorted out what the theory is, I am going to have to revise some of it but it is revise not think through for the first time. I also have found a way of keeping my self aware of who is in each scene. I need to rewrite the current scene to put someone in who is missing.

Today went to church this morning. Sarah was on form, the only snag was that Junior Church over estimated the time it would take for Sarah to get to the distribution of daffodils so it had us waiting while Elizabeth went to fetch them. There seems to be regularly about two to three primary school and younger children in junior church, I do not think it is always the same children.

eventually getting around to chattering in the New Year

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 a winters evening

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


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


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

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


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


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

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

Chattering of the first week of winter

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.

A day late, last week was so busy!

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.

So busy I almost did not have time for a migraine

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

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).

Settling into the New Year in Sheffield

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 .

Busy week preparing for Christmas

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.

A quiet week after the bank holiday

Neil the tutor at my writers group had spoken of it taking a long time to do the layout of the booklet for my writers group. I presume this was because the way most people work it would indeed take a long time and drive me almost frantic. That is they decide how each bit of text should look individually and then alter it accordingly. I work with styles. I decide that there are a limited number of styles needed for a document and then I assign each piece of text to an appropriate style. If I therefore want to alter a style then I just edit the style. I do not have to search for every individual piece of text that I want like that and reformat it. I think I worked with Title, headings 1 to 3, two styles for Tables of contents,  a context style, a poetry style and a prose style. The only extra formatting was putting odd words into italic because they were either slang or foreign. It works, it is easy to deal with. Over fifty percent of the corrections have been editorial rather than layout. Technically not my brief, but I don’t really have the ability to go back to the copy-editor and say “is this change ok” and in the end the author actually does have the final say with this booklet. Admittedly the one piece that missed the copy-editor completely was by the copy editor.

Anyway by Monday I was just handling the occasional request for changes and so found that I had unexpectedly free time. So I finally got around to digging out the Drupal book and reading a couple of chapters. I am now at the stage of installation. Well before I go that far I need to order my new PhD computer and let it arrive so my old laptop can be turned into a linux laptop and used for running drupal on. I also need to change my old machine in work into a Linux one but that is not for web development but so I have a back up machine.

Tuesday I was into work. Actually having had a break I was trying to pick up where I had left things. This was not helped by the fact works email was down and I had looked at it on Friday to see what needed tackling and had a note that there was at least one appointment that needed making. In the end it was not up until Thursday and as Friday was my day off, the appointment could not be made until next week. However a book had come with the formula for the variance. It was therefore a very quiet day. However I spent the afternoon struggling with a piece of software so that it would draw the graphs I thought it should. It did in the end, but I have also discovered that I seem to have misplaced a piece of software I support. This would normally not be a problem but with my machine being reformatted I should re install it. Mind you I have the manuals and I have not had a query about it since I said I would support it.


Wednesday and Margo was in and we reviewed the sports paper with Richard and saw how he was handling it, also we looked at the Butyrate. I had just solved out how to get the graphs I wanted from the original package. I think I am going to do a graph per sheet although really they should be three graphs per page, or better still all six on a single page. I then went to get my hair cut during lunch. My hairdresser offers a tea coffee or water while we have our hair cut. I asked for black coffee. Unfortunately it tasted nothing like coffee normally does but like a weird mix of chemicals. That taste transition is for me the main precursor of a migraine, so I went to Boots and got some Migraleve, back into work, sorted thing out so I could go home and sleep it off. The result of the advance warning and therefore being able to take diversionary action was that it was lighter than most. I think technically I still was recovering on Thursday but I was certainly able to get up and cope with life.

Thursday I got the graphs drawn, spent some time sorting out the SAS licenses and generally had a fairly productive but normal day. Still got to contact a colleague about getting more memory in my old machine so I can change it to a linux machine. It really is too low spec to run modern Windows operating system effectively at work but as I don’t trust my present machine I do need a back up.

Friday was interesting in that I was in one of my very rare homemaker moods. So amongst things I made a ginger, carrot and sweet potato soup and also put on some whisky and ginger schnapps. For those of you with Scottish sensibilities the whiskey was firstly a blend and secondly Irish which just happened to be the cheapest blend in Waitrose at the time. I think I am rather pleased with this as it will mean that the schnapps will probably be smoother than it would have been otherwise. I also rang the doctors surgery opposite Herringthorpe URC to make an appointment with the manager as part of Herringthorpe URC needs assessment. Unfortunately having psyched myself up I rang just as he was leaving and did not get through but when I rang fifteen minutes later he had left. So I will have to ring on Monday.

Yesterday my parents came over. We ate the some of the soup with coconut cream in it. I sent them home with two boxes with the base in it as there was not space in my freezer. Dad brought over their new router from Zen. He wanted to know how to set it up. I hope it is largely setup and they can just set up things from the box and it will work. Slightly concerned that the routers wireless name begins with Thompson, I hope they have sent them the right one and there isn’t a Thompson household with a router that starts with Russell. On the other hand Mum spotted I was reading Pioneering the Third Age by Rob Merchant which I am not finding very satisfactory. She wanted to borrow it, however I managed to persuade her to take Valuing Age: Pastoral Ministry with Older People by James Woodward and Wesley Carr which I suspect and I think she does will be more in line with her interests. As I said to her it was not important that she remembers what is in there as she is not anymore active in the pastoral care of her congregation but if she wants to think through this as an older person it is one place to start. What I am trying to do is find ways of characterising the discourses around older people within congregations. This is somewhat harder than for children as often the older people are creating the discourses themselves.


As per usual we went shopping in town. Mum wanted a ball of wool as she thought she would run out with the jersey she is knitting herself, while their coffee grinder had stopped working. So we went to John Lewis’ that sell both of these items. Dad uses the coffee grinder most days, so it was well worth replacing. Dad in the end bought a burr coffee grinder, partly because the blade one was only a pound cheaper and a Bodum one. It was expensive as it had a chrome body, but what put me right off it, was its grind button was exactly the same design as the one on my grinder and my experience is that I have to be very careful I clean that properly or the grinder stops working. It is a fiddly bit of plastic and awkward to clean. I think the one he got will be stronger and therefore likely to last longer.

Busy week in work, followed by an interview and migraine

The week has been busy at least work wise. For those who think that Universities have holidays can I assure you, you are incorrect. They have teaching time which is called Term and research time which is called vacations. When you are research support therefore your busy periods are distinctly different from what people imagine, largely coinciding with the holidays. The result is that I am just keeping my head about water at present. This last week I have been involved in five separate projects. Four from human nutrition and one from Education. The human nutrition ones are fairly varied. The take up of vitamin B12 in older people. Actually fairly interesting, as the take-up seems to be related to lifestyle rather than eating food groups related to B12. So you get some counter-intuitive findings, where a scale that scores highly on meat intake actually suggests poorer B12 intake (the scale also weights quite heavily for drinking alcohol and is related to smoking).

Then there is couple of sports ones relating mental ability to food allowing for exercise. Unfortunately fitness seems to be confounded with distance so the further people ran the faster their overall pace. It looks an interesting study, but I think they will have to do a follow up study probably getting people in to do a fitness check prior to doing the race. Maybe the researchers in human nutrition need to join with some from physiology and see if they can find funding to work with participants in a specific set of events.  The nice thing I can see is that participating in this study might be its own reward for the participants as they would get training advice and they would take even beginners.

Then there is the study on Butyrate. This is by far the most time consuming as I am having to spend quite a bit of time “developing” a meta-analysis for it. It is not straightforward as there are only about a dozen studies and most of those are inadequately reported. They also are not reported in standard units which adds its own complexities. I also suspect that the things measured are not normally distributed as there seems to be some sort of relationship between mean and the variation in the results. So it is going to require quite careful work.

The one for education was totally different. It was a researcher who had been so busy teaching that they had lost contact with their project and so needed to sit down and think through it again. The thing was that when I had caught onto what she wanted it was very simple to give her a way to do it easily with her project. What she wanted to do was to group like things together; basically put them in the same folder so she could think about them with some other notes on the side. Sounds easy the sort of thing you can do with scissors and paper except some of her things were sound recordings or tape recordings.

Well that kept me busy Monday to Thursday and then on Friday I had an interview in Rotherham for Herringthorpe URC. This one was with a local councillor, unfortunately he was ill but one of the people who works with him was there to talk to me and really gave me a lot of contacts. There is almost far more going on than people thing and I find that quite often those in council positions are some of the few who have an overveiw. I am still in two minds whether I should follow up by actually talking to another councilor for the ward the church is actually in or if I should leave it at that.

Unfortunately by the time I had got back from that I had gone into the migraine, cycle. This one was so long in turning up I thought I might have got over them for a long while. It held off pretty well for going to the Dicksons but mucked up yesterday quite royally. Tescos delivery and migraine don’t mix especially when person suffering gets the delivery time wrong. I “coped” by eating largely dry toast and drinking weak black tea. I went to bed after they delivered and got up early evening, thinking I was better. However by evening after taking five attempts to print something on the back of another sheet of paper, I eventually gave up. My brain was clearly not functioning right so I decided to take today as another migraine day.

So today rather than have a full day at Herringthorpe I have spent it inside, quite a bit in bed and finally got up and could face drinking coffee so am beginning to feel more normal although as the children running around down stairs still makes me fragile I suspect I am not ready for facing the world quite yet. So am not going to the songs of Praise at Herringthorpe.

Courses, Holiday Preparations and quiet days

Lets see what this week has involved. Monday was the bank holiday. I think I spent most of the day recovering from the migraine that came on the day before. Luckily it cleared early evening. However I had all the post migraine problems like not remembering what I supposed to be doing before the migraine set in.

Tuesday I was in work and giving the last of the three new SPSS courses. This one has had a lot of work on it, and still needs more work on it. I am going to try and do this over the summer. The work there is mainly putting in exercises where I have just given data sets. The ending actually worked pretty well but I have to find a data set for one exercise. On the evening I went out to Herringthorpe for a  Bible study. I decided to have a go and seeing if I could draw a Nicky Gumble talk. The answer is yes I can and I tend to be less argumentative afterwards. Whether that is a good thing with Nicky Gumble I don't know. I think he might find me quite challenging if I was ever in a group he led in real life rather than on a DVD.

Wednesday I had a meeting with Ahmed about the data for analysis. This set of data I am enjoying as it is coming out as it should on the first analysis which means I need not explore further. The data is on using sperm or plastic beads to stimulate response from oviduct and a second on whether oviduct or kidney cells respond more. That is interesting as it seems that kidney have much lower values even with OVEC but that when sperm is put in these respond more. I also think my new computer came. However as that was shopping night I decided I better go and do that rather than setting it up. So I went down to Waitrose and bought bits and pieces. Then Stuart came around for a shower, having annoyed Monica (his Landlady) the previous day by taking a shower in a room she was treating for mildew. He continued coming around to Friday.

Thursday was election time. had an interesting talk with my hairdresser when I went for a haircut. She was saying that what scared her was many of the younger voters were voting according to how good looking the leaders of the party were. I am afraid my view at present is that what you want to do is vote for a good local MP. However as I live in a safe Labour seat that is not likely. I suspect that locally more labour voters came out to vote to prevent Liberal democrats getting in. I think this is hugely unfair as the one party that makes an effort locally is the Greens and I would hope people would vote for people who were around on the ground. Any way I got my new computer up and running. No Cathy this is not the one with Dad's money that will be one solidly for PhD. This is one I bought for personal use. It is MY computer, one I can do what I like on and one that is reasonably light to carry around.

Friday was officially study day though I changed that largely with Saturday so went shopping on Friday. I sorted the torch I bought last week from Argos and got one that was working. This was really a bit late as I wanted it to try and photograph cherry blossom against traffic at night, but the blossom on the tree required has all gone brown in the last week. Other trees are still in full bloom but taking the photograph from them is not as feasible. Secondly I bought another pair of trousers, so I now have two for holidays and saturdays although my old dusky pink ones are still the most comfortable ones there are and I am wondering whether to pack them even though they are perilously close to having holes. I went into WHSmiths to buy some extras for the packs for Jenny and Cait and got stopped by a girl selling make up. She showed me a tiny pack with 25 different sorts of makeup in it. My brain was going "Who on earth uses 25 different bits of make up!" I use a maximum of twelve and then only on high days and holidays, most days only eight bits and when I am having a quiet day nothing. My aim is not for people to go "cor!" but just to present a decent face to the world. She then went onto suggest I bought twice that amount. She has got to be kidding, and as a rule I don't give make up, its to personal (the exception being for young girls who are playing with it). I went into Sheffield Scene to buy a book about Sheffield for someone up in Stranraer who is missing it. While in there I noticed that Shiregreen URC had a book about them being sold there as well. I wonder who would buy it. Sometime back came across this set of postcards and had thought about getting them instead but I wasn't sure that Victoria Hall would be open or that the lady in Stranraer would like religious paintings.

Saturday I spent most of the day reformatting an interview. It actually took quite a bit of time as I had to split it up into stories and comment on them. I am really needing to do this for all the stories interviews I have transcribed which is a pain, but think I may get away with putting them into Nvivo and categorising the stories from that.

Today I have not done much largely due to time of the month playing up and giving me cramps. I was going to go to Herringthorp but I did not feel good when I awoke and suspected that I had slept poorly due to it. Annoying as I was hoping it was getting better. Anyway it was  bad enough to send me back to bed with a hot water bottle by midday and I had little concentration between getting up and going back to bed. The only thing that seems to work is alcohol.

Webinars and Alcholic Ginger Beer

This has been a full week, or at least it feels like that at this point.

Monday was supervision, which feels a long time ago now. My supervisor had warned me he might be late, so when I wandered up five minutes early expecting to make myself comfortable in front of his office, I was rather surprised to see him walking down the corridor. Admittedly in the opposite direction, but that is also the way to the local departmental office and his secretaries office. However by that stage it was also obvious that a mild migraine was happening. Although there was a headache,the main effect was that my thought was disjointed. I think I got the main points but am not sure I got the nuances. Fortunately the other symptom was my eyes feeling as if I had been looking at a computer screen too long, which as all the students in Birmingham were desperately trying to finish work before the Easter break, I did not stand a chance of doing. I was also supposed to go to writers group but given the migraine and such I just did not want to press myself and went for an early night instead.

Tuesday I was in work if a slight bit post migraine but otherwise a fairly good day, same Wednesday, Thursday and Friday work wise. I have spent most of the week revising course notes for SPSS as we are splitting the course in two. I also sent a note out  to see if there was anyone else interested in Prayer Group along with who to contact. We are down to four members and with the turn out is quite haphazard. Some of that is because of my migraines but it is not only that. Oh my middle boss, has decided to get all his team together next Monday morning. He has made two mistakes which have not chuffed people. Firstly he did this a short notice, I presume because he had not finalised things but that is also problematic as at least two of the sub teams have to organise cover and they normally cover for each other. Lets call them team A and Team B. If team A are needed in a meeting then people in team B cover and visa versa. Secondly timing, I object because it is Holy Week and he as a good Catholic should know better than to schedule major meetings in Holy Week. Others are of the view that a two and a half hour meeting would have made things much more workable than a three hour one.

Friday evening I went around to the Dicksons for a meal. They were good company and the meal was delicious. Them having me around for a meal is a real sanity stop in my life, even as this time, we do not have much to talk about other than small talk about church business.

Saturday I was involved in the URC Webinars about identity, it was an interesting experience. All the training sessions had been during the working week and as I was in work and my computer at work has no microphone attached and I was not going to organise to take one in, I could not do any of the trainings. Were they expecting everyone to either be ministers or retired. So it was very much a suck it and see situation. Actually I would not have got to a training anyway as my email asking for an invite went to a spam folder so I did not get an invite until Friday. I looked at the list and by chance chose the one with least attenders, I think twelve in total apart from staff. The two morning seminars had about thirty in each, I was the noon and the afternoon one was supposed to have around thirty as well. The technology worked okay even on my relatively old pc (it is coming up for five years old) although I did find that I undid the link to the earphone and relied on my computers speakers for comfort. Not something I could have done for comfort. The major problem was that we could hear all the background noise from the interviewing session including the typing on the keypad. They ran a survey and  asked us to talk about it. Quite often the feedback was criticism of the design of the survey. Probably the survey would have worked better if there had been a preliminary attempt, that was unless this was a preliminary attempt. I also think they would have got better more indepth responses if they had run some questions in front of us before hand so we knew the themes of the discussion.

They said the last one was a reporting back session so I signed up for that as well but it was far more  a discussion generally on the theme of "God is still speaking". I am quite sure that the key to success of that is whether it is sold as heading in an attractive direction. If it is sold as the latest management idea for growing our churches it will be seen to be just another layer of paperwork.  Major challenges are to get a sign up rate so that local URC is likely to be signed up and to get a training rate so that everyone, not just those who come to trainings is in on the act.  To do that it is not persuading the people doing the webinars it is going further. I think people need to think a lot more about what we mean by welcoming. Seriously we have welcoming sussed. If people walk through the doors the reports are that they are welcomed. The problems are prior to that, which is giving people the confidence to walk through the doors and after that, which is supporting people over the first two years with a congregation. It is very easy for a person to be welcomed the first week but ignored the third week they attend. Shall we say the problems are inviting and integrating.

Another problem is that we talked about URC as a diverse denomination, we are as a rule theologically diverse but culturally similar. There is not the same range of worship there is in the Church of England in the URC, we draw our membership from a specific cultural groups, largely middle class, often very wordy, in fact you could almost say we have a bit of a love affair with words. We are good administrators. In England we attract people of Scottish or Irish descent, this is true in former Congregationalist Churches. In fact English non-conformist culture shows strong Scottish cultural norms. It is often easier to make sense of  the over arching culture if you take a Scottish rather than an English perspective. We like to be close to the bible.

Oh having finished that I was on an adrenaline high. Decided that maybe not working on anything was a good idea so got a bottle of Crabbies Alcoholic Ginger Beer and having tried it, I am still unsure whether to class it as a ginger beer with alcohol added or what I suspect is more likely a fairly flavourless lager with lots of ginger added. It is clear golden in colour, has a head, maybe too much of a head, there is a mild taste I associate with hops but it predominantly tastes of ginger although not as sweet as most ginger beers. Acceptable but nothing to rave about.  Now I am debating on whether to have a go at making ginger schnapps.

Today I went to Herringthorpe, Pauline was at a family wedding so they had a speaker from Wycliffe Bible Translators, actually one of their workers in Bangladesh who works with the literacy teams there. This meant that the already overloaded sunday technically was more overloaded. The result was that Palm Sunday and Good Friday got little mention. The church does have mid week services this week but I will be surprised if lots of people attend. They also are at liturgical odd times. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday have short meditations and Friday EVENING is the major mid week service. There seems to be an ecumenical event on Thursday evening but that is at Broom Methodist. They did give out palm crosses but that and a couple of hymns were all the references to this weeks liturgical events.

Catching up after absense due to Writing

Lets see if I can recall what has happened. I think I actually got some work done just before I sent the last letter, then there was all the difficulties of getting diaries to coalesce on a suitable date to review. On the Monday when we could have made it, they did not respond to my email until after lunch time and I went on a late lunch so did not pick up their email until too late. The result was that we could not meet until Thursday afternoon, which was not a good day for me as I was a lot more busy then than on Monday but all worked out.

Thursday also was my back to work interview. It looks as if I have at last found something that reduces "migraines", I checked through what had changed that might have led to the sudden rise and looking back wondered if I had accidentally cut down on my intake of magnesium, not something that I recalled having any effect on migraine but when I googled I found pages like this one about magnesium. Decided to see if supplementing with that would work and they have dropped to about one a fortnight I think. This is better than it was prior to Christmas, not perfect but a lot better and with not getting as many colds and the weather improving I hope my attendance at work will rise from even this level. The making pancakes on a Saturday for breakfast also seems to work in that I become then better at eating properly. I have still to sort out an appropriate filling suggestions welcome as I don't think cinnamon and sugar is quite right. I find it particularly good if I prepare the batter on Friday night so I know I have it in the fridge when I get up Saturday morning. I think having discovered that the batter keeps for 2-3 days in the fridge I will try making it up on Friday night and having pancakes on Saturday and Sunday as I find I am having to make more than I actually want to eat at present.

The weekend was writing. Unfortunately I went down with a cold on the Friday. I rang in sick, got back into bed and crawled out around 2 pm feeling decidedly off colour. I had hoped I'd still be able to write on the afternoon but my brain was not functioning even for reading novels. On the Saturday I was struggling until I decided to split writing out ideas and structuring the essay into two different tasks. A programme called Pagefour is good for this in that you can have a document divided into lots of different tabs (pages) and then you can write on a specific idea or topic in each page. Then later you can integrated them into a single document in word, I use a combination of copy and paste and re-writing.

This week work wise has been boring in many ways, I had few deadlines and it was time of the month, so that although I was in work I had very little useful concentration for the first three days. I did some reading of a book called "First things First" which claims it is fourth generation organising. Its okay, most of the new stuff is stuff I automatically have done already although writing out the things I would like to be thought of as in the key roles in my life was useful. It made me realise that certain roles are really the same role as I would want to have the same results. I other words I want to be the same focus as a person even though the people I am interacting with may be different. That meant I had a role free so I asked what would I want to add to these and found one that I normally count more as a technique than a role and thought about that.

Bible Studies are still going at Herringthorpe. We are still working through Nicky Gumbles take on the sermon on the mount. I am surprised at the way people are smug at some things and at others think they are impossible if God does not enable it. In may be a generational thing, but I am wondering why they think forgiving those who wronged you  and living generously is so difficult while being honest and sexually pure is easy. It just seems a bit arbitrary to me.

On Friday ended up making Dhal and today have  cooked rice. Saturday my parents were over. They seem to be keeping well although their lock broke the night before as they came in from a meeting with the local Methodist Church. They put it on the chain and put a stool behind it. Dad was all worried about how long it would take the locksmith to mend it. They rang at 8:00 a.m. the lock smith was their before 9:00 and had completed the work by 9:30 a.m.. Locksmiths appear to be a very different trade from some other groups you call in an emergency. The day was damp (not wet) and as they were late doing two things was not possible so we went and got a light meal at PJ Taste. Dad had a burger while Mum and I had bacon sandwiches. The burger was a venison burger so not Dad acting totally out of character.

Today to Herringthorpe and commented on how noisy coffee is. I am fast coming to the conclusions I must find something else to do during the early part of coffee. I am not bothered what but the noisy is such that I find I cannot hear anything at all. Otherwise the service was pretty decent call age worship and such.

Supervision sandwich

Lets see, well Monday I spent most of the morning in bed due to migraine, got up slowly but by evening was feeling fine so went to writers group. This was because there was something of a three line whip on for writers group as the WEA is talking of cutting sponsorship. It is not actually all that clear what this sponsorship means to us (apart from extra work for Neil). The sponsorship is anyway going to end after Easter. This does not mean the group is stopping, just that it will become a free standing writers group. We no doubt will have to create some structure if only to share the administrative burden with Neil (he has eye problems, so a group secretary may well be in order at least and we will need to talk about treasurer). The group was good with one new person joining. I had not written one, ironic as I had the perfect base for the homework. The new person is another poetry major (yay that makes three of us).

Tuesday in work, bright maybe over bright but certainly no sign of the migraine. The roads however were treacherous. I got as far as the intersection between the path to my block of flats and the neighbouring one and skidded on sheet ice! The path has buckled really badly and the result was to form one slab basically into a puddle but it was slopping (don't ask how water sloped and froze, all I know is it did). I went straight back in and got the remaining cat lit and spread it over the area. The big advantage of fullers earth or cat lit is that it forms a sticky layer when in contact with water. That evening it snowed again so went out and put out more. People were allowed to go home early from work. Actually that happens more frequently in Sheffield than Manchester I put it down to snow preparedness.

Wednesday funny, could have been migrainous but managed work and doing what I needed. The only real hint that everything was not fine was that I needed coffee regularly and often. However so large was the demand for coffee the Students Union was out when I first went over. Must be a snow essential. It was still a snow day in Sheffield. I cannot remember much but I can remember making it into work and buying the coffee and printing out the papers. Shopped in the evening at Waitrose and did not slip on my way back.

Thursday was supervision day. This meant up early, get to the station (get out of front door, and toss up whether it is safer to struggle up to the tramstop or to walk down to the station, in the end decided to walk down to the station, as possibly less ice to contend with). I also discovered I'd missed taking my anti-migraine tablets the previous evening. This I think meant I spent the whole day slightly frazzled. On the other hand getting to see my supervisor is good. It always gives my PhD efforts a pep and I normally feel better in myself after going to one although I also normally have a lot of work. Actually was pretty good when I came in.

However next day was migrainous which continued to Saturday morning, however the migraine cleared on the saturday about noon and was replaced with a very able and doey mood. I got through tons on Saturday afternoon what is more remarkable made only one mistake and in such a way that I can rectify it next Saturday if I can get to town. I also managed to make soup and sort some more on the website plus write something for writers group. So in half a day managed a full days work. These times when I seem able to cope with lots, contrast as much with what is normal for me as the times when I am in bed with migraine. Not sure if they are just the other end of the wave or what.

Today went to church at Herringthorpe, a lot of talk over the weather, worship was led by two of the Sunday School teachers. They did well and I saw Pauline before and after worship so my presumption is she was there the whole time. The previous week they had been badly effected by snow so that even for a service taken by the moderator they only got a 50% turn out. Fortunately the christmas party which was due to be held next Saturday is cancelled.