After a Baptism

I am going to try highlights but I am trying to recall what has happened and not finding it that easy. I think this is possibly because things have been dominated quite a bit by thesis writing. The weekend before I rather got distracted. I had a recalled a quote from Lord of the Rings for my thesis and I needed to trace it. It took longer than I imagined to find it but I ended up spending quite a bit of the Saturday reacquainting myself with Lord of the Rings. I had forgotten what a rollicking good story J.R.R. Tolkien can be and would decide to read a page to check for the quote and then realise I had read twenty pages without stopping. This weekend I am at the changeover point on my second chapter. Upto now I have been writing in the current chapter the easy bits, which are the detailed description of what went on that I see as important. The big challenge with this is the selection of material. There really is far too much stuff there and that is without dealing in detail with the interviews. From the few times I have done in depth analysis on the interviews, as opposed to simple reviewing there has been tons of stuff just below the surface, at least enough for another thesis and I am having to keep myself from being distracted by it. I am however moving into doing the theory for this section. I seem to suffer a loss of confidence as I approach this, yet once I am really writing it I am able to do so. This may be the legacy of having moved so much out of the areas where I know I am capable into an area which I still feel a novice in. I have at least got through the totally terrible first draft (did not even both computerising it) but have started computerising a second draft. This coming week is going to be interesting as I try and redraft that section so that it is ready for me to fit the chapter together next weekend, all but the last section which is relating the stuff talked about back to Reformed Piety.

Meanwhile Fleur sent me a flyer on a meeting at Westminster College on the topic of Reformed Spirituality . Now it is organised by the by the United Reformed Retreat Group So I spent quite a bit of time sorting that out. I know I really should apply to the retreat group but have not got around to doing it yet and I had to pay Westminster up front.

Work wise it has been busy, the senior bosses have this last week caught onto the fact that the move is happening in the immediate future (this weekend and next) and have therefore been driving the secretaries batty with , have you thought of X. The normal reply was “Yes six weeks ago”. On Wednesday evening I was given my bit of it when one of them saw me leaving work. The fact that I had sorted out to my satisfaction most of it two weeks ago and that I knew I had lots to throw out but apart from that and packing most things were sorted, just had not occurred to him. The fact being that if things weren’t sorted by now I would be feeling very threatened given the way things were set up originally. I am jolly glad that people lower down the department have done the organising.

Last Friday as I returned from doing some shopping after the Broomhall Breakfast I spotted the police helicopter hovering over the church, this made me nervous, not because I thought there was anything going on in the church but there had been a bit of a to-do with a couple of Breakfasters and talk of sorting it out in the car-park afterwards. Any I went back to the church then walked with Mary home while Sarah I presume deliberately went the other direction. The helicopter left as we set off and there was no trouble.

I don’t think I would recall this but that evening Ship of Fools learnt of the death of Genevieve, now Ship of Fools knows it can mourn a death, and Genevieve was a shipmate who I respected hugely although with little contact. She seemed wise and intelligent. However I am realising that the circumstances of her death (she was shot in church in USA by someone the church had been helping) in close proximity to the incident in the morning just unsettled me.

Otherwise another paper has been published in work and I think another three have or are about to be submitted. I have been busy filling in forms and such. Otherwise I have been dealing with doctoral students in landscape or such with a few foreign language students thrown in for interest. There is more than enough to do.

Today was the baptism of Theo Wheat and also of Annual Church Meeting. The baptism went well and the crowd that came for the Baptism filled the church. The comments afterwards were appreciative and St Andrews members are a disciplined lot who got back to church meeting on time despite the chocolate rich tea biscuits. Sarah is impressive in her management of church meeting and managed to get through the whole ACM procedure and introduce the Church Life Review in under an hour! This is in marked contrast with the meetings I recall as a teenager which could take up a full afternoon as each committee gave their report verbally. The big problem was that as it was a small church everyone went to everything so we really did not need a report on it.

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.

Chattering after a tiring couple of weeks

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

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

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

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

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

After a tough week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chattering on a train ot Edinburgh

It is about a fortnight since I last wrote. I will try a thematic rather than a day by day diary. Work has been busy, too busy at times as I can see items slipping off my to-do list by me not getting time to do them. I am at one trying to get a course I give onto video, don’t worry I won’t be appearing, only my voice and what is on the computer screen! The problem was when I agreed to it I thought it would simply be recording the course I had giving, nice easy and simple. However the software is on my computer in my office. That means I need to record it separately. If I am doing that it makes sense to record it in five minute to ten minute segments and not as the whole hour. If I am doing that it also makes sense to upgrade it to the most recent form of the software. In other work what would have been a three hours of work is not going to take more like thirty hours and I need to find the time. This is not helped by the fact that I am very busy with lots of things going on that are taking me out of the office.

The first of these was I had a trip down to Birmingham for a supervision session. It was one of those rare occasions where there really was nothing to talk about, the stuff I was writing for my thesis was long winded but otherwise largely fine. One section of about a thousand words was really in the wrong section and another bit needed cutting but otherwise not much. I have it down in too much detail at present and will need to shorten it at some stage. This is not surprising, I am aware of writing in detail in order to delay when I have to write something more difficult. Nor had Google scholar been finding anything particularly interesting to read. Sometimes it turns up that is very useful; other times it turns up things with no connection at all. I like to do it at Birmingham as it saves me having to do complex log ins. However as I discovered yesterday my machine at homes seems to know when Birmingham has a registration and when Sheffield has and will ask me for the relevant login! I was impressed especially as I got hold of the original of a paper I have quite a tendency to quote.

Writing is going smoothly with still around two thousand words a week. I have written about using writing as an analytic technique, more accurately creative writing. The whole process of re-creating a person or an event forces you to think of details that you just pass over when experiencing. For instance at St Andrews the kitchen was down the hall, therefore if they have coffee after church they had to somehow get hot water into the church. When I had coffee after church it just happened, but when I sit down to describe it I am faced with “how did they do that?” question. Now that fact has no real relevance to my thesis, but when I a person acts in a certain way perhaps makes a speech I need to work out why, not just accept it as happened and that is often very theoretically insightful. For instance why was it Bill who found the way through and not Ethel, why does the Pentecostalism of A grate at Herringthorpe but that of his close friend B just sits happily and so on. These are questions novelists are used to asking themselves, what seems odd is the no ethnographer has spotted this connection between portrayal and analysis. As an ethnographer my first resource is my notes and interviews and not my imagination but I am still faced with the conumdrum. I also have started the first serious theoretical piece in that I have started writing where my research is with respect to the methodological research tradition. It is pretty much mainstream ethnography but at the more postmodern/playful end. That means a variety of things, firstly I can and do write in the first person when it is me who does something, I also need to give an account of my research position and to reflect on the way characteristics of my identity have interplayed with my research. Perhaps more controversial is my use of auto-ethnography to try and establish a space other than the congregations themselves from which I can talk of the Reformed tradition or more accurately what it means to be a Reformed Christian within the URC at the start of the twenty first century. The account because it is me, this is a piece of academic research and because what I am is partly because of what others have been, will involve interacting with the literature of the tradition but it is not simply another formulation it is an attempt to try and tease out how I personally experience the tradition.

Yes I was on strike on Wednesday 30th November, the UCU was out and as I belong to the UCU I was out. This had an interesting effect of my work and I suspect of many academic staff, in that what actually happened was the work got scrunched up into the remaining working days in the week. This actually meant very little time to do the background work. This was not helped at all by the fact that I discovered that I had manage to do an analysis on a partial data set on Friday rather than the full one and that when I did the full one something I thought did not happen appeared to happen. I need to find what is wrong with the graph, I suspect it is the form it is in, in which case it is easy to rectify, but it won’t be rectified until Thursday as I am at a conference at the start of this week. I am also acting as a “translator” between computer science and human nutrition on quite a big research proposal. It was interesting, at times the computer scientists were assuming I was a nutritionist, when in actual fact I had just been working on with the nutrition researcher for nineteen years. I probably if pushed could also do a good impression of a researcher into kidney disease.

Last weekend and the reason I did not post was that I was at my parents. They had been down to my great aunts funeral and my Mum was quite taken with this part of my father’s family who she really does not know. To be fair Dad only knows those of his generation, the paths divided I suspect about the time he went out to South Africa and they did not reconnect when he returned. This Great Aunt who died was in her nineties but was also an aunt by marriage and I think married to a brother who was younger than my Gran. There is not much prospect of us connecting as they seem to be spread throughout Southern England and we are solidly Northern in residence. There is now I think no known relatives of Dad’s in Birmingham. Other than this they seem to be getting on. We had a massive hunt for a pattern for the jumper Mum is knitting for Dad, only for Dad to eventually find it in his study. So I have now tied the pattern to my Mum’s knitting bag. The only difficulty was that the trains there and back were standing room only! I was shattered by the time I got in despite the fact that I got a fairly good standing space.

Today has been a bit of a learning experience. I picked up my purse when I went to the station but forgot to check my debit card was in it. It normally is but yesterday I ordered a book for my thesis and forgot to put it back! So I ended up at the station with plenty of time but unable to get my ticket. Only option really was to buy another and I went to the desk in trepidation expecting it to be very expensive. It cost only about twenty pounds more than my original (I just hope I can cancel the tickets and get some sort of refund as it is still not the sort of money I like to toss about. I fortunately (due to previous experience) was carrying an alternative credit card. I really must see if I can find a solution to this. I really am not sure that apart from going to London there is much point in getting saver tickets. London prices are just ridiculous if you do not buy in advance, but when not doing so, the difference is much smaller.

Chattering 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.

Out of placement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Moderator's prayers to Salsa Classes

So what has happened this week. Well Monday was quiet I think. I know I was busy in work but apart from shopping and such I can’t remember anything major happening. On Tuesday I finished the backlog at work and saw a PhD student who is the sort who seems to suspect statistics are very delicate electrical circuits and if you don’t treat them just right they are liable to give you an electric shock. She first presented the data as two t-tests. However on typing in the second set of data I spotted one group was identical to the previous study. So I went and redid the analysis using oneway ANOVA. Then spent fifteen to twenty minutes repeating again and again the same information on how to read the output. I also suspect I signed up for Linkedin, now I must admit at some stage I really should do this, but at the present the real reason was just to see an article. Unfortunately the sign up seems to involve providing contacts and the time I wanted to spend on it was not that much. I tried to remove from the list it found the obvious distant contacts but thinking through it at the time was beyond me. I will sort it at sometime and some stage just not at present.

However that evening I went to a prayer meeting called by Kevin Watson. Well it was one of those times when someone decides to ask relevant questions for my research and all I have to do is sit back and listen. He wanted to know what had been happening and what was God doing at Herringthorpe. Great questions from my perspective and it was worth listening just to hear what people thought God was doing at Herringthorpe. Yes they came out with the story that I was familiar with, but they could have come out with other stories, there was also one cryptic comment by a church secretary who commented that God is changing Herringthorpe’s attitudes. Well the result was I came back and wrote up immediately.

The price came the next day when I had a migraine. Actually it was strange in that I did not wake with it, but as soon as I got to breakfast I started feeling very tired. So decided to see if an hour back in bed would clear it, only for me to realise as I got into bed there was a headache and other migraine symptoms as well, so I got up, rang into work and then crashed for four hours.

However was back in work on Thursday and trying to catch up on time missed on Wednesday. I had a data set that had been problematic. I thought I knew what was wrong but it was going to be a lot of work. I tried it and it did not work. So I sat back and suddenly the obvious popped into my brain. What people had eaten for breakfast might just effect the results of their pre-race test! and that would cause problems when dealing with the post race test and altering for pre-race performance. It worked and I finished the report and got ready for a meeting with my boss on Monday.

Friday was supposedly a write day, but at least the first part was interrupted . I turned up to breakfast to find not only had some of the food not made it, but they were short staffed and the Archer Project had decided to shut without telling us. So I did breakfast duty for a while on an ad hoc basis i.e. I was both sides of the counter doing what was required. I therefore went about 8:30 and got back about 10:15. I had also picked up Philip Benedicts book “Christ’s Churches: Purely Reformed - A Social History of Calvinism” and I realised not only was the last section on “New Calvinist Men and Women?” which picks up Max Weber’s contention that Reformed Christianity brought in a new “psychological” understanding of what it meant to be a person and explores the historical evidence for this. His results would not be conclusive for two reasons., Firstly the he would not want his carefully nuanced academic tome to be read either as simply full agreement or disagreement rather as interesting hints and such. Secondly the data is largely external data such as the percentage of illegitimate children born during that time. It is quite a big jump to go from practical workings out to internal understandings. However Philip Benedict is also a good writer and I found the work intriguing. Needless to say I spent the rest of the morning reading that. The result was I only got around to writing in the afternoon and in the evening Herringthorpe ladies were having a Salsa night. The lady teaching was good and she made it simple enough that we managed a form of Salsa dancing. I had not realised you needed shoes that could slip. It was good fun. It sounds as if a group of the ladies enjoyed it so much that they will be going to her regular class on a Monday night. Unfortunately that clashes directly with writers so is not on for me.

Saturday I spent writing. Unfortunately I have not finished the essay yet. It is going to be a long one and I think it is important enough to write the extra. There seems to be some hidden rule of writing that the more time available the more time it takes to write.

Today I went to Herringthorpe for the Palm Sunday service. Junior church is definitely down on normal weeks although the creche was up due to grandchildren. This year they sort of managed a procession (last year if I recall the crosses were given out at the end of the service as Pauline had forgotten to do them). Evening service was cancelled due to the fact that two families would be away so I have only had to do the church heating this afternoon.

Normal weeks for the start of February

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coping with snow in Sheffield

I think this will be highlights as I can’t remember over the fortnight to give details.

By the time I got back from Writers Group on Monday 22nd, I had a burning sensation at the back of my throat, which normally heralds a cold; so I looked in my work diary and as the next day was free in work, I took it off and bombed the cold, the result of which is that it did not develop.

The next day I had some premonition of the coming weather as I ordered snow boots and a down gilet and snow boots unfortunately they have not arrived yet. I also was helping out with the Arts and Humanities PG Open Day. They call it an open day but it lasts about four hours in the afternoon and it is mainly Sheffield Undergraduates who come.

The weekend was writing weekend. It was also church fair at Herringthorpe on the Saturday but the snow arrived overnight and as I had no duties, plenty of writing, I cancelled. I did get to church on Sunday although the congregation was reduced as more snow had fallen over night but then there was a Baptism which increased the numbers. So the church was still fairly full. The writing was progressing well although I am struggling to find methods of talking about the ways the congregation uses space as part of creating an identity. Part of it is that I am realising that I have to cope with a different understanding to space to that that is assumed with other theorists of religious space. The nearest I can get is sacred space in the Reformed tradition is four dimensional with the time boundaries being as important as those in the other three dimensions. This is not the essay I intended to write, there is something about introversion and extroversion that needs writing but I am cautious over how to deal with this. I was ahead of myself so went to writers group on the evening.

Tuesday I think proved my dedication to teaching. The gig I did had only come through the previous Thursday when finally the Social Science RTP decided to contact CICS and see if we had anyone who teaches NVivo. If they had actually gone back through their records they would have seen my name for having done this in the past but doing something sensible like that isn’t what they are about. So I got on Thursday an urgent email. There was no way I could write anything special especially as it was a writing weekend, but I do have a 2 hour course I give to introduce academics to NVivo but even to do that straight requires some preparation as I work off my memory. The other snag was that it had to be given twice on the afternoon to two different groups. So that already was a tall order, when you add that it was the day the snow settled in, and although about 12:30 pm the roads were clearing by 13:30 it was coming down harder than ever. Then the students were protesting over cuts to Higher Education and staging a sit in. I’d never been to the room which was in the bowels of Bartolome House. It seemed to go okay. There were only eight I think to the first time but upwards of twenty to the second and therefore I finished after 18:00 p.m.. Unfortunately despite my best efforts to gather all my cold weather gear stuff when I left, a glove remainded in the room and when I noticed I did not have the energy to go back and look. In the midst of me doing this my university email account was switched to Gmail.

It was still snowing on Wednesday. I went in late due to the previous days length and the place was like a ghost town. What is more remarkable is for the first time I was sent home by University due to poor weather. That is not to say it was the first time I have gone home early due to poor weather but that has normally been my decision, this time the senior management in the University told everyone to leave before dark, so when the flood lighting started coming on in the building opposite I thought it was time to leave. I walked down to Waitrose and promptly saw another member of staff had also used the early leave to go shopping. Also met up with a former colleague who was doing a quick shop. Also bought myself a pair of gloves but these were women, and with my long fingers even large women’s are really too small, I can wear them for a while but the fingers always end about half way down the bottom segement of my fingers.

Friday I made it too the breakfast albeit late. On the way back I came across a mum, who I presume is the wife of one of the overseas students, pushing her daughter in a pushchair to playgroup. Daughter was squalling, Mum believed it was due to not wanting to go to playgroup but I suspect by that time it may have had more to do with absence of hat, mittens and blanket. I am not quite sure what to do, the quicker that child got to playgroup the better.

Yesterday I mainly did two things, I cooked a big pot of sweet potato, carrot, ginger and chilli soup. It was going to have coconut in it but I could not lay hands on the coconut milk I thought I had so it had to make do with Soya Dream instead. I think if I was making it for anyone else but myself I would cut back on the amount of Chilli I put in. I also went shopping. I went into Blacks as well as buying yet another thermal base layer (can one have too many) bought another pair of gloves. So will have a spare pair while up in Scotland however I suspect there will be no shortage of takers for them.

This week I have a trip to Birmingham planned provide the weather is such that the trains are running. If the current forecast is right, this should be the case. After that I can start Advent properly and just to make sure I am due to go out three times over the weekend socialising. I also will be collecting greenery for the Advent Wreath at the chaplaincy, the carol service being the following Tuesday. I will cut back on greenery and paint (only four cans this year I think not six)

Balancing essay writing, placement activity and birthday

This time the reporting will be thematic rather than weekly.


I have over the last fortnight been preparing for my supervision. This involved me deciding whether to re-write the article from the talk I gave at SLS or whether to write something fresh on the discourses around older age. The thing is that I am finding the literature rather poor and though I can find endless stuff on older age, it all reflects broad discourses from society in general rather than what I am seeing in the churches which are largely discourses crafted by older people themselves. It seems odd that somebody who is official studying older people in the church, has not spent time actually talking with them. He might analyse the NT, OT and early church well, he might even deal with the pressures in society well, but how do older people in the church construct themselves and how do others in the church construct them is a very lightly touched upon and seems to me to be the elephant in the room. Anyway I felt that unprepared to tackle that and I know that I really need to have my new computer here to handle the recordings that I decided that the revision was in order. Actually part of this was that I came across an article on small groups which had the actual article interspersed with scenes. As different parts of narrative I was using stood quite well on their own and the narrative did not have narrative tension as a whole I felt that reshaping things like this my be advantageous. I also needed to put in some very basic ethnographic stuff and also Reformed Liturgy stuff. Anyway I was at the stage when it was sent out to my proof readers, thanks Ruth and James, and then Martin, my supervisor found that he was fully booked on the date. So I am now in the process of rearranging the date of our meeting and sending him the essay to comment. I may well try and get something written on discourses around old age next weekend or at least some reading done.

Placement wise things are going well. I remember being amazed with St Andrews Chesterfield about how the access changed when I had been there over a year. This time I got a list of dates, times and meetings, plus I have spotted that evening services actually are a bit of an odd animal. It is low key but it is also one of the place where the informal discourse that runs the church goes on. The previous Sunday evening service they ended up deciding what they would do for the next while. It was suggested that they might follow a book. The initial suggestion was The Purpose Driven Life but when Mike Thomas checked that he found that it was not how he remembered it. So much to my relief they moved onto The Me I want to Be by John Ortberg. One day I was down town doing something that needed to do, and passed by our local CLC bookshop (yes I know, but it is the sole remaining Christian Bookshop in Sheffield). I went in to see if they had it, which they did, so I bought it and photocopied a portion of it so people had chance to prepare for this evening. Hopefully Mike will have ordered the copies by next time. Also I wrote an article for their quarterly magazine this time and mentioned their notice board was in need of a revamp, hoping very much that by the time it was out, nobody would have done it as it was several months ago that I actually checked it. It had not been. So when the fabric group got to view the board they agreed with me. The problem is that people who come to the church don’t see it regularly. They largely come by car, park in the car park and go straight into the church. However the noticeboard is the main physical presence for most people as the church is set back from the road. I also got another interview in on Friday, well I say an interview the lady just talked at me the whole time having read my questions in advance. She certainly had lots to say and I think having someone to listen was important.

Also since the bank holiday I have been doing the layout of a booklet published by the writers group I belong to. I enjoy doing layout. It is something that comes naturally. That can not be said of my copy-editing skill and therefore the most annoying things have been when I have had to do copy editing and not layout. About 50% of the changes requested once I had done the final layout were copy-editing. The worst one was the last where I was asked to put in a setting for an extract from a novel. Only the setting desperately needed copy-editing before in could be included. I particularly hated doing it as the writer is Russian and her normal prose has a Russian feel to it, that I think really enhances it. However this was long convoluted sentences that were written in different past tenses and was really quite difficult English to read. Now I could turn them into clearer English but that would be English-English and I might loose the Russian sound to the piece. It was a very difficult piece piece to copy edit and I am not really happy doing that. The changes that the printer wanted were just technical bits that I enjoyed the puzzle of sorting. Oh I also got to design the cover, and used a fractal from Apophysis Software. The printer asked what it means, the answer is that it does not mean anything except what the viewer sees. Fractals can be spectacularly beautiful or just chaotic.

Birthday was quiet on the whole. I failed this year to get the day off work, accidentally letting someone believe I was free on that date and thereby allowing them to create a meeting on that date. I did however have Friday off, although I was interviewing for my PhD on that date. On Friday I went to Breakfast (having done a Tescos shop on my computer first) then went onto Traidcraft to buy chocolates for the person I was interviewing.  However they weren’t open so I went up to Blackwells, not intending to buy, but then they had a book on Theological Anthropology and as that might be one description of my PhD I thought I better get it. Not that I had come across the term before but I am doing a PhD in theology that is decidedly anthropological in nature. Unfortunately I suspect the theological issues I will end up talking about will be significantly different to what the writer thinks they should be. For those who are interested while St Andrews Chesterfield was very concerned over communion, with Herringthorpe it is Baptism. If anyone had at the start of the PhD said I would have to have a chapter on the sacraments, I would have thought them crazy but it is increasingly looking as if I will. Anyway lunch time I went out to Roche Abbey taking a sandwich and a bottle of gingerbeer with me. I also took my camera with me and got some photos of the abbey and surroundings. Unfortunately I am still feeling my way with this camera (it was Olympus Mju not the Nikon DSLR) and I have not quite managed to get to doing everything right at the same time. So some are over exposed where I got it right on others and I managed to get my thumb slightly in on the one that I think has the best composition. If you are interested you can see the pictures on Flickr. In the evening I went out with the Dicksons to the Hui Wei> which is an interesting Chinese restaurant. They had a party with children in it and were slightly distracted with them, but the food was still good and slightly different from your normal English Chinese restaurant.

However the net result of that busy day was that I was whacked yesterday and as a result did not get things I was planning to do, done, so stayed at home this morning to finish off the essay.

This coming week is when everything starts up again so I have my writers group on Monday and Bible study on Tuesday at Herringthorpe. I will be interested to see if there is any change with who turns up as there no longer is a proper meal before hand. I actually suspect on the whole not. They are looking at Acts this time so we shall see how it goes. They seem to change the style of study pretty regularly. I have been to set book bible studies, I have been to talks by Nicky Gumble on video and I have been to themed bible studies and that in less than a year. Hopefully the rest of the week will be fairly quite. As there are more students around staff are getting back into teaching mode.

Writing and Presenting an NVivo Course

This week has been a story of preparation of a course. Friday I had to give a course on NVivo. The thing being that I was getting more and more dischuffed with the course we already had which was anyway for an earlier version of the software. The earlier version  I had adopted a document from another university and then written the course around it. This time I was writing the document myself from scratch. I had to decide what went into it. I had to plan the presentation. I scrapped the exercises.

Well I had three days to write it, then one to give it. Actually that is not quite fair. I had the document half written last week, but it had taken me four days to get half way through and I had three days to write the rest. Its manageable but only just. On top of this last Sunday evening I discovered that my lounge heater had given up the ghost. It had done this sometime previously but I had put it down to the plug not being properly in and given it a good thump. This time I decided to investigate and the first thing I discovered was the plug was not properly in because it was a timer device and at a point when the plug was half in that had melted and stuck the plug half in. I could not get the plug in or out. I went to change the plug but the heater did not spring miraculously into life when I did so. Now I am not a hundred percent sure this was due to the heater being faulty. It could be any of the three following. Firstly me not quite establishing contact when rewiring the plug. Secondly a faulty plug got off a hair drier that has not been used for ages. Thirdly a faulty 13 amp fuse as it was got from a 2 plug adapter my grandfather made over twenty years ago. My grandfather made it so the adapter is perfectly safe, please don't worry about that. My grandfather was both very safety concious and a precision engineer. This is more than I can say for the factory that put the plug onto the hair-drier. I am going to buy myself a couple of new plugs and some new 13 amp fuses and try again some day, but in the mean time I ordered a new heater for the lounge. I went to Argos.

Monday I went to writers group, it went well again, with not a lot of corrections, the writing was also going smoothly. Tuesday was another story. My brain decided to throw a migraine about mid day. I presume from running on nerves, I took pain killers and continued on writing as it needed to be finished by that evening as someone else had to format the document. I got it done, went to Herringthorpe for Bible study, its amazing what paracetamol and caffeine can do. I got through feeling okay although more irritable than usual now I look back on it and not as quick at responding to situations. Got home safely although my brain was fantasising nightmares on the way home. I knew it was my brain and just ignored it. I do not mean hallucinations but seriously daft ideas seemed to occur to it, the sort that a tenth of a seconds thought show as being obviously stupid and dangerous.

I awoke the next morning to feeling sick and nauseous.  Fortunately it was my day off, unfortunately it was the day the heater was supposed to arrive and I also wanted to get up to date with my diary. Argos turned up with the heater just after 9:00 a.m. and I spent most of the rest of the day in bed and went to bed early, but despite that was still feeling groggy the day after. However it had cleared enough about 12:30 a.m. for me to feel that it was worth getting up. So I got up and made myself the best clearer of migraines I know which is scrambled eggs on toast followed by coffee. The net result was that I was firing on all cylinders despite the fact that I sort of knew the migraine wasn't quite gone.

The course went well on Friday, although some of them found it too intense. They wanted to have their hands held while they did exercises. The problem being that the exercises that they were likely to do would not be particularly illuminating. This course actually worked really well for the two people who had spent some time with NVivo already and bought their own laptops. They were able to make connections between the course material and the things that they wanted to do. This was for them a big break through, because they were getting the how to, for questions they asked. One of the questions both of them had was about rearranging nodes. So I will write that bit to the end of the document.

On the evening I went to see Jean and James Dickson. They are as busy as ever and this week have had a host of early morning meetings with James getting the scaffolding in to change the light bulbs at the church. Also he had been PAT testing the electrical equipment in the church. There is some problem with the sound equipment so Cliff will have to come down and have a look at it. They have lots of holidays planned for this coming year, to such an extent that it was difficult to find dates for me to have supper with them.

Yesterday I was supposed to go to York for a Ship of Fools meet. However, despite having organised it, my migraine returned, and I felt safer in bed in the morning. In the afternoon I got up and did some web design for the website Morag and I are working on. My big problem at the moment is my printer is refusing to scan and the one at work will scan but will not then send it to my email account, or would not when I last tried it. I will try again as it kept saying server down and that just might be the case. The webdesign is very absorbing. I did two three hour sessions on it without realising how the time was passing. It is like a jigsaw puzzle, you get one bit right then you turn to the next bit and see if that is getting right. However I have realised that what I am really doing is designing the look of a content management system. So I am now looking at Joomla to see if I can adapt the website to work with that content management system. If I can it will ease things for both Morag and myself. No real hurry, as I need a photo I can only get in May when I go up.

the Lows and highs of a fairly quiet fortnight

If I recall rightly the last letter was just after Zachary's baptism. I threw a migraine on the Monday, which sounds like bad news but having done almost a fortnight without one and then only getting one for a day, I was actually pretty pleased. It is not ideal but it is lots better than one a week often lasting more than one day which is what it was at its worst. However it meant I missed writers and I had actually done the home work. In fact the previous writers had also clashed with migraine (the bank holiday meaning that there was a fortnight between). Now all I need to do is write something for this weeks homework.

I think the rest of the week was uneventful on the whole. I was doing a piece of semi-qualitative analysis at work and found it absorbing and draining with the level of concentration required. I could only do a couple of hours at a time and then I was drained. Wednesday Cliff and I spent about half an hour playing with the sound system. We managed to turn the organ on and we could recreate the feedback. Then Cliff switched the organ off and the feedback disappeared much to his surprise. The question therefore was how was the feedback being created. In the end we traced it to the fact that the organ and its speaker were both earthed which meant that an electrical loop was being created and this was then picking up the signal from the audio loop and transmitting that out of its speaker which is behind the pipes of the old organ and therefore behind the microphones. Hence we were getting feedback. Arrgh, three bits of kit working together to produce problems.

The weekend was a writing weekend but with a lot of other bits and pieces going on as well. Friday I had thought we had Greek in the morning as did Sarah. It turned out that Ted had either not registered the time or we had not picked up his apologies. However as Sarah was around, she decided to stay for coffee. I think we both felt it was time we did a catch up. In some ways it is quite different being a participant-observer in a congregation to being a member. There are boundaries which I have had to keep. I cannot expect the congregation to provide pastoral care for me, but that means I need to keep in with the system at my home church. I am fortunate in having a minister who understands what participant observation entails and elders who have gone out of their way to sustain the contact. Late afternoon I saw the cranial osteopath and then I deliberately took the evening off and baked a ginger cake.

Saturday I had a Tescos delivery and I imagine something else but I cannot quite fathom what and there is nothing in my diary but Sunday I felt I really had to get over to Chesterfield as it was a month since I had been at a service. I decided that I preferred to go to the evening service. The thing that I found remarkable is that I had both the essays written before I went to the service on Sunday. I had Monday morning booked off but I had to be in work on Monday afternoon. As there were two essays I sent one to Ruth and one to James and both were promptly returned. James doing his after being released from hospital on Tuesday morning. The thing was that writing for a change came easily and was not a struggle. This is unusual, I normally require over two clear days and I only got one and two bits of other days. Moreover I wrote quite a bit on the Friday, I just wrote it, but on my first day writing I rarely do anything good, yet this time when I had very little available time I did. I don't know what makes that the case.

Actually one of my meetings on Monday was cancelled but I still got to a meeting which was about me putting things up on the web. Then got complements on what I wrote for writing group on the evening. One person called me brave, I suppose if the people I had written about had been me then that would have been brave, but they weren't me, just imagined other me-s, if you get me. They both revealed and hid bits of me. I wasn't them but I did not state how I wasn't them.

Tuesday was just a work day, nothing particularly interesting going on and anyway I was tired so not up to creating things to happen. I did shop but really shopping on a tuesday is a bad idea, Waitrose always seem to restock on a Wednesday. However Wednesday was housegroup. I end up arguing with someone who said he had a "full" understanding of eucharist, if he had used the word "sufficient" which I think is what he meant I wouldn't have argued but a full understanding of eucharist is a lot to ask. The more time I spend listening to people talk about eucharist the more I am persuaded we are talking partial models and the big problem is when we think our models give us more than a partial understanding. Of course we would need to tease out what sufficient is, but that is not the work of a housegroup. I took Wednesday off work as I was tired.

Thursday was another quiet day although I finally got the book of photos I'd ordered from my holiday. Let me do some explaining. I spottend that Photobox, the firm I often use for prints, now will make up books from photographs. I thought rather than forget to put them into an album I would just order them straight as a book so ordered the smallest number of pages A4 book they do. It was posted the Wednesday before last and should have arrived on the Thursday. However the packaging meant it would not go through my letterbox. So the postman took it back to the depot but only put the card through on the Friday. So on the Saturday I asked them to be delivered to my work address by the internet on the following Tuesday. They did not manage to but delivered it last wednesday to the wrong address but the person receiving it recognised my name (we are actually in the same department). So left a phone message on my voice mail in work. I then rang her on Thursday and she brought it over, the address if only next door to the actual building.

Friday was also quiet though I got to have a good talk with Jean Dickson at the breakfast. She'd only got to bed at 2:00 a.m. and because she had the bananas for the Broomhall breakfast and could not bear to have to throw some away she came down for the 8:00 a.m. start. She was just going then to do a shop at Waitrose having not got one done the day before. There were plenty of staff at the breakfast. Then on the evening I had a evening off and got to bed by 8:30 p.m.. I was shattered even if Jean could manage on less than six hours sleep. Actually I hope she got a nap later on in the day.

Saturday was a shock to the system. A day with nothing planned. So I got up, shopped for a bit, came home got myself lunch, did some painting as I had an idea for a piece that I wanted to do, spent some time on the internet and then went for a walk with my camera, and end up by preparing a reading for today. A busy day but no "have to"s in it. Well if you except the reading.

Today I had my parents over as Dad was preaching at St Andrews Sheffield. Dad turned up just after 10 a.m. so as to be at church by 10:30 a.m.. So I gave him and mum a Green tea and finished my breakfast. Then we walked up to church. Dad is walking so slowly that I was not prepared to try and cross Upper Hanover Street without a pedestrian crossing even if the traffic had major redirecting as they were retarring by the tramstop. The sound system worked perfectly this week. I am not sure why as there are two options, one I deliberately put the lectern at 45 degree angle to the front of the church. This means the microphone is not pointing at the Organ speaker, or Douglas put the wires around the other side of the organ. I know that turning the lectern helps but does not cure and so it may well have been moving the wires. On the other hand as Derek pointed out it was a very simple service to mike. I also briefly demonstrated how to use the battery tester and how to use the lolly pop microphone.

James and Jean Dickson had invited my parents and I to join them for a meal at Antibos. As James was still in hospital at the time (yes he managed to be admitted twice in one week), Jean asked Derek along. Antibos is an Italian restaurant in West One and reliably does good food. The meal was pleasant and although there was background music it was not intrusive. While we were at the meal, Jean got a phone call from James saying he was now home having been discharged (Graham their son had collected him from the hospital). Dad thoroughly enjoyed going there after the service. I hope they are as good in a fortnights time when we go there to celebrate Dad's 50th anniversary of ordination. Mum and Dad stayed onto about six then drove home getting in well before dark.