Review of the year at Christmas

Thanks for those who have been in touch and apologies that the majority of my contact is limited. Hopefully by this time normal service will resume.

When I first set down to write this review,  I had the usual feeling that there is nothing to write but there is plenty to write, but having sat down I realise that this has been a year of happening and it does not look like it will settle down for a while yet. So what was supposed to be the year that things quietened down with me finishing my thesis ended up quite eventful.

My thesis is not finished yet but at last is gelling. I hoped to get it done by Easter but with the best of my pushing I just did not manage it. I wonder now if there was more I could have done but that is wondering. I think I had underestimated the intensity of the final stages of writing. As a result it took over my brain between Easter and early summer as I tried to get it to gel and worked on the suggested changes by my supervisor. I could make the changes, and they did improve it but it did not set. I even got during August to putting it into final form, but I was not happy and indicated so to my supervisor when I sent the copy for him to read through. He agreed, suggested a major redraft and I am working through but it is at last coming together. The point which was probably most indicative was when at last supervision he asked me something and in a sentence I summarised the whole thesis. The change was to move the metaphor far earlier in the thesis and this just allows so much more use to made of it. It really is the core strand around which I build the thesis. I have just added the second important strand and now will need to pull the other strands into their respective places so the argument becomes a rope rather than tangled net.

The reason for aiming for Easter for finish was in part that Sarah Hall the minister at St Andrews was leaving there. She had had perhaps the most successful ministry of any recent minister at St  Andrews and is much missed. The congregation is missing her even more as the situation in Sheffield is in flux, and there is no plan over the long term provision of ministry for the whole city. Some of this is that locally people were waiting on synod which had the power to decide funding. However, synod felt that it was its duty to respond to local desires. In other words each was waiting for the other. As the ideas are very different and not looking towards the old system of pastoral negotiation where a combination of size and mission governed the amount of ministerial oversight you could expect, there are problems. Unfortunately much as I would have liked to be involved with finding my thesis more demanding than I allowed for at exactly the time the congregation was hoping for me to get more involved and ever so often I took on what was supposed to be a small job and then found it had a hidden demand that took three or four times the energy. By the end of June it was obvious that I was not coping and with other commitment the only way to manage church was to take a complete sabbatical.

Then early in July my mother and father went to meet up with friends at Tittesworth Reservoir which is fairly near Macclesfield. It was a warm day and dad had been off colour during the morning but on the afternoon collapsed and an ambulance was called. My mother is getting increasing forgetful with dementia and is no longer allowed to drive. So my sister got a panic phone call and had to go down to Macclesfield to collect Mum. She slept here the first night while I organised myself to get over and take up the care of Mum the next day. We went down that afternoon to visit Dad at Macclesfield and agreed he should go for angiogram at the North Staffordshire Hospital in Stoke on Trent. Unfortunately it was found that dad had more wrong with his heart than they thought at Macclesfield and they kept him in at Stoke. This was bad news as with Mum’s dementia it was difficult to get her there. Initially we thought of car but it would mean that both Cathy and I would have to go on every journey, one to drive and one to keep Mum stimulated so she did not switch down, as if she would do that she would forget what the point of the journey was. Adrian, Cathy’s husband suggested train instead. This meant that one of us could take her as we could give her our whole attention on the train. It was still a full day for every single visit. With Dad likely to be in hospital for longer we had to decide on longer term care for Mum. In the end we ended putting her for respite care in a home near my sister. My Dad joined her when he first came out of hospital. They were not happy there and got home as soon as they could and function much as they did before although we are trying to get them to keep a slightly higher level of care than they have.

Work wise I am still in the same job as I have been for over twenty years. It has changed many times. I work far more as research support for various groups. At the present these seem largely to be in Human Nutrition, Linguistics, Landscape and Medical Education. You will notice that I manage to cover three faculties in that. One irony is if you had asked twenty five years ago my parents which daughter would do research into human nutrition, they would have replied without hesitation my sister. Quite a lot of the stuff I am presently involved in falls broadly under the heading of food security. This looks both at the stuff around food poverty here but also at long term sustainability. With linguistics I partly support the users of statistics and I also deal with users who are using NVivo software. NVivo support is much like SPSS support was twenty years ago. Maybe in ten years time people will be using quite happily on their own but at present there is a lot of hand holding and people think of me as more skilled than I actually am.

I finally got a holiday in November. This was booked in the summer when I thought I would submit at the end of October. However with needing to redraft it was clear I would not. Also I had booked a cottage close to where my God family were living. Unfortunately their whole household disintegrated in September so none of them are now living near there. Even with this I decided that I needed a holiday and went. It was superb. I spent a lot of time exploring some of the more lonely birding sites in the area that are good in the autumn and then coming home to a real fire. Of course I had to set the fire up in the morning but I found that doing that gave me something to look forward to each evening.

Cathy, Adrian and their children still seem to be doing fine. Adrian is happy enough provided that he has enough work coming in. He does not like being idle. Sam is in his first year of GCSE and had great difficulty in choosing which subjects to stop as all his teacher thought he would do well at their subject. Hannah is doing well, enjoying dancing and is getting into the top years and starting to think of high school. Cathy was absolute brick during Dad’s illness. She took over all the organising of financial matters which left me able to spend time with Mum without having to worry over finding somewhere to look after her.

Writers group is doing well. We have done a couple of readings this year, one as part of the Broomhill Festival. The person who booked us was surprised at how professional a group we were. Not only was a programme developed but we also had everyone on strict time limits and finished on time. Then there was our annual reading for the Off the Shelf which is getting more and more professional. This year I organised a sound system. I could have connected up some metal boxes and it would have worked as well. That is not to say it did not work, it did but at a psychological level as people largely did read close enough for the microphone to pick them up and people were not confident moving the mic so it was close to

Since the holiday  it has been back to the usual routine and getting the thesis sorted. I have at present three chapter in supervisor draft, I hope to get another two before the end of the Christmas break and maybe start on a third. I am spending Christmas with my parents and we will be going up to Cathy’s for Christmas day.

A long with submitting my thesis next year will also be my parents golden wedding if they both survive. Not quite sure how we will celebrate has still to be suggested.

Reporting on the last couple of months

Dear All

I am final writing another chattering. I am afraid until my thesis is finished they will be intermittent as it will depend on me having some time to spare to write a letter. As you might have gathered, if you follow my thesis blog, I ended with more editing on my thesis than I expected. The thing being that a major restructuring was required. This was not the dire news it could have been, I already had the feeling that the thesis though written just did not cling together. So the whole of October was spent firstly regrouping and reorganising my thesis, then starting to edit the chapters again. I have redrafted two chapters and am on the way with a third. There really is more on my thesis blog.

Otherwise work has been busy. I found myself carrying more and more tasks in work. I have been trying to keep on top on NVivo training that the University of Sheffield asks. I am afraid that I am not finding enough time to do this as I would like. I am not sure I will ever be able to meet the demand and I seem to become an expert by virtue of nobody else being willing to tackle it. I seriously question whether this is the right way to tackle it.

I am also keeping up with the work from Human Nutrition, this year we are hoping to do some research on Food Banks particularly with respect to the fact that the increase has been exponential in the last year. It is to try and discover how food bank provision is seen by the people who use them. The work I have been involved has shown that homeless people have aspirations to a better diet but the need to get the calories in trumps that. However there is also a culture around food and that can lead to provision being, “unhealthy”, in that the easy improvements would be unpopular with users.

There is also work around sustainability. I am also developing a close cooperation with the department of Linguistics, this is slow but sure. Perhaps one of the more unusual applications of statistics although I know there has been people applying these techniques to the authorship of Paul forever! However the number of statisticians that have actually been involved is low and there is a tendency to use sophisticated techniques when people have not understood simpler ones. There is now a seminar running and a group of about four researchers I see regularly. The final group is a number of researchers from Landscape and Architecture.

Many of them are doing quite complex work and often around the same themes. I have had to refer one of the Architecture students to landscape as what she was doing was very similar to Landscape work in approach although in a different area. Her own department tackled similar issues but took a different approach.

At the end of October my writers group had its annual reading as part of Off the Shelf .It was a good evening and the reviews we got from it were good. I think the fact that we had a reading in the summer helped as we were all up to performing. For some reasons, the fact that I supplied a portable sound system meant that people projected their voice better. The sound system was there but many did not use it. I also think we set the standard higher each year. This showed with the amount of effort we put into choosing the pieces to read. We used to accept what people brought but now Neil (our tutor) starts it with giving instructions on what makes a good piece to read and more attention in the rehearsal is given to the suitability of pieces.

On the Sunday before I got away on holiday my loo valve decided to leak water into the cistern. This meant I had to get a plumber out. In the end I found a firm called Aquagas who came out. They not only stopped the leaking that evening, over the next couple of days the plumber came out several times to get the loo working properly. Due to a lot of misadventures he ended up replacing the innards twice (everything decided to go) and in the end given the time and energy he spent on it, the charge was very reasonable. He kept going until he got it right.

The holiday was supposed to be the one for after submission. In some ways there was a real temptation to not go on holiday as I needed to write; however it was increasingly obvious that I was very tired and that I struggling to keep going. In other words even though I had not submitted I needed a break.I went up to stay in a cottage owned by the person who I have B&B with when I was visiting my God-family. My God-family is no longer there and anyway it was obvious from New Year I would near more space to myself. The cottage I booked was the Auld Smiddy. It is a really well equipped cottage. There was a slight problem with the central heating, nothing that I could not handle. The owner went away at the weekend, and I worked out even if it went completely there was no problem. There was an electric shower, kettle, modern wood fire, two electric heater and a paraffin heater. So without it I would be warm and able to wash. The kitchen was better  equipped than my own at home. There was a sun porch that looked over the fields past another cottage and over the sea to the Isle of Mann. During the week apart from crows and blackbirds that were there every day, I saw in the field: a fox, several rabbits, roe deer, sparrow hawks and a flock of redwings.

Port Patrick

Further a field there was pretty good birding, saw barnacle geese, a red kite, an egret, mergansers, pochards and kestrels. These are just the ones I could recall. I actually found that one of the reasons I liked birding was that I liked the reason to be out in the spaces that it took me to which were wilder than you would think of if you were just touring the area. The places I found were Crook of Baldoon , Wigtown Bird Hides which are down by the Harbour in Wigtown and look out over Wigtown Bay Reserve and finally North of Stranraer I found Wig Bay (that is the best link I can find ) which is World War II causeway that runs by the edge of the bay and gives views of the birds feeding at the sea edge. The wider view is not spectacular as it looks over to Stranraer and Cairnryan. Coffee is available at Soleburn Garden Centre . I also walked for a bit along the cliffs at Port Patrick but there were mainly gulls to see and I am no good at identifying gulls.

I found having a real fire was good. It was not just that it made the cottage lovely and warm but that as I reset it every morning I always knew that I had that to come back to in an evening and look forward to.  I am not sure whether I would feel the same if I had one at home but on holiday with long dark evening it made something to look forward to. I therefore did a lot of reading, not for thesis but books that had been on my to read list for far too long. Only one finished but I did start a second and found one left by another visitor called Skyward by Mary Alice Munroe. It is light, it is fairly predictable but it was enough to get me hooked into the story so that I went and bought it on Kindle when I got home so I could finish it. Unfortunately the storyline I was really interested in was not well concluded but there was still plenty to entertain.

I came back this last week and have been picking up the pieces of normal life in Sheffield. So far I seem to have more energy