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

Holidaying followed by a busy week

Lets me assure you it has not been laziness that has kept me from
writing for the last couple of Sundays. The first one was a blazing
hot day and I with Cait and Jenny were scrambling up and down cliffs
trying to find St Medan's cave. We did not find it and there is no
real sign of the path. The next stage I suspect is to try and find it
from the sea but that will be a few years into the future. Last week it was simply writing for supervision that kept me from writing here.

So lets me start with describing my holiday. I hired a Corsa, a far better size of car than the car at Christmas. It actually took a huge amount of stuff, although Jenny complained that she was short of space in the back of the car. Given that when I was her age my parents owned a Renault, I did not have much sympathy, plus its purpose was to get me around. One snag with the car is that someone (I suspect a previous hirer, had polished the windscreen with car wax, Tony did a marvellous job of getting it clean after I drove through a flock of suicidal flies just outside Manchester, the wipers would not touch the mess). Actually I think the modern Corsa has replaced the Astra as my favourite car to drive, despite having reverse in the wrong place. The decrease in size makes it more moveable and therefore I feel more in control. It has good viewing as well.

Wigtown Monastory site
Originally uploaded by jengie@btinternet.com

Morag seems to be doing well, and thoroughly enjoying her work as a
walk organiser (I think it is one of three jobs she holds down but I
heard little of the other two). Mostly she worked in the morning and
then came out with me on the afternoon. Sometimes we did bits of
things that helped her as a walk organiser on the afternoon but I bet
she did not count these into her working hours.

On the afternoon we would meet up somewhere, normally a coffee shop and then go and explore somewhere. At the start we were travelling further afield than
we normally do, going for walks in the area of Stranraer and even
spending one day over on the Machars going as far as Whithorn, but as
the week wore on we settled back to doing very local things. A couple
of decent walks from Chapel Rossan bay, one with Dora their dog and
the rest of the family and one on our own. I think we visited
everywhere we normally do except Kirkmadrine and we were in Logan
Gardens only for coffee (two days running).

The weather was glorious, nine dry days and two mild showers on the 10th. The down side to being in Scotland when the first good weather of the year occurs is that
that is when the farmers make their first cut of silage. Now I suspect
from my point of view the problem is not the fact that they are
cutting silage but it is the first cut and that is known to release
all sorts of things into the air, more so than second or third. Well I
was on hayfever treatment for about three days then the silage was
mainly in and I did not need the treatment. On the Saturday we went to
Port Logan and had a go at geocaching. We failed I think because we
were climbing over the rocks too much and not enough looking for loose
rocks near the path. The girls are growing up but not yet at the stage
where their mum and I are too boring to be seen with. No doubt it will
come. Although Dora the dog seems to think that the pack is complete
if I am there and she has to herd me in. She is a bearded collie but
shows most signs of having gun dog instincts, only she does not wait
for the bird to be shot before fetching and so far they have all
escaped to sea. However if she ever turns up at Sheffield having run
away I will know why. This set on Flickr contains most of them, there
are some duplicate pictures I have not bothered putting up but
otherwise that is most of what I took.


Since then I have had a busy week. Al; right so Tuesday was over
written with a migraine, except I managed to get to a meeting with Sue
from Herringthorpe who is chair of the Needs Assessment Group(NAG).
Made too important decisions, firstly that neighbourhood meant
immediate area of the church not including a more deprived area about
a mile away as yet. The reason was two fold. Firstly the realisation
that if the church did take on that area, they would have to do
something based in that area they would have to do something that
either meant deliberately going into the area or they would have to
bring people to the church, plus there is a cultural difference
between church members and people in this area. None of this would
matter if they were enthusiastic about community work, but as yet I
have no sense of real enthusiasm and I do not want them to overreach
themselves by taking on a challenge they are not up for. The other
thing was to use "loneliness" as a theme for something the
congregation may know how to tackle. Hmm not sure I should be doing
this but if this project is to get off the ground and church meetings
decision is that it should then decisions like this need to be taken.

Wednesday I was back in work and life did not stop while I was on
holiday. I found someone wanted to see me, and several other bits of
work needed doing. However one thing is that I am moving offices again
and expect to move again in six to eighteen months time. This time it
is back to 289 Glossop Road, top floor, quiet with quite a bit of
space (it used to be a 2 person office). Actually if I am honest the
move is just in time, as I am finding the main office of the computer
centre more and more distracting as I try to work at present. I
presume due to getting better but I don't like moves. I was offered
two other spaces but those would have been worse than my current
space.

Friday I started putting up a shelf over my bed (when I told Dad
earlier he automatically heard bookshelf). The reason being that while
I was away I found myself quite naturally saying evening prayer if the
books were on a bedside table by my bed. The nearest I can get for a
bedside table is a shelf, so I have now put up a shelf. It is
horizontal (near perfectly, i.e. I cannot tell the difference with a
spirit level). That said the first hole I drilled was a failure and
had to be filled in again and the rawplugs that came with the
attachments were useless. I ended up using some I bought and they
worked perfectly. The final hole I drilled worked fine. I learnt a lot
about drilling into walls and breeze blocks in doing it. Also over the
weekend got the papers ready for the next supervision.

Saturday ended up shopping at the same time as James and Jean, each
time we went out separate ways in the supermarket we ended up meeting
up again. If you want to know why I was wondering around in such an
odd manner I was looking for a hook to hang something from. Most
people use them for tea towels, I wanted it for a light cross as I did
not fancy banging in a nail just below my newly hung shelf. A thing
that Safeways used to have in, but I could not find anywhere in
Waitrose. Hence madly wandering up random aisles with a trolley load
of shopping. I will have to try Maplin next. I also sent out my
supervision papers to my supervisors.

Today due to time of the month I decided to skip morning worship and
only go to evening worship. I am going to have to debate with myself
whether that is a good idea. Not because I found them manipulative or
high powered charismatic, anything but. For those that remember
Parrswood Evening services during August, that is what the strongly
reminded me of. For those who wondered why I was nervous of
Herringthorpe, please understand this, it was not finding something
different, but finding myself at home that scared me, and that is what
I did tonight, liturgically I was at home, the people might be
acquaintances but the style, the manner and the content were familiar.
The familiarity of that service was unnerving, the problem is that
every time I find 'a home' in many senses then I have to move on from
it. Moving on is difficult, the more I do it, the less I like doing
it. I do not want to be drawn into the feeling of home, just to have
to leave it, and with this being a study placement I know now I must
move on in just over a years time. I learnt that my supervisor was
busy on Thursday (well all next week) and that we should really
rearrange. The thing is that if I had known it was for the week after
next I would have timetabled myself differently i.e. had this weekend
as a writing weekend and enjoyed the bank holiday.

Also before I forget I have started a Twitter account, no I am not
asking you to subscribe, it is pretty inane, being comments mainly
about what I am doing. However if at any time you want to check how I
am because you are concerned then have a look at it. It can be seen by
any of the following methods:
1) Look at my chattering blog and it is in a box on the left hand side
2)On my webpage http://www.jengiejon.info
3)On my Facebook wall you will need to be a friend of mine on
Facebook to see it but if you have a facebook account and want to be
just let me know.
4)Or if you have a twitter account follow jengiejon on Twitter.
So lots of ways. The reason for using twitter is it allows me to put
one message in lots of different places and therefore I hope people
who want to know how I am can find at least one of them.

Courses, Holiday Preparations and quiet days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22nd Sept 07

I am writing a day early in an attempt to get this out after a long period (about a month) of not writing. The reason has been essay preparation followed by a holiday that although only 10 days long manage to include two Sundays, the first through travelling up, the second because I was there and my internet connection was limited. Yes I still had wireless broadband, but at Morag's not where we were staying. That meant it was the time I could nab between demands from Jenny and Cait. The fact that my parents also wanted to read any family epistles, meant that there was a reduction even in that time.

Lets see if I can update people. First thing I can recall is worshipping at St. Andrew's Chesterfield for the first time. Problem one is how to make clear to the minister that the one thing I am definitely not there to do is to check how REFORMED it is!! I might be interested in how it embodies its Reformed position or even how it rejects it, but I will not make any judgement on whether it is making the grade as a REFORMED church. I am interested in "how" not "what". Of course you have to look at "what" to understand "how" but you are looking relationally. I am jokingly-serious thinking at present that I should get a t-shirt with "I am not the Spanish Inquisition" on the front and "nor have I any dealing with section O". Section O being the URC national disciplinary procedure which we seem to have inherited from the Congregationalists at least on my father's account. It rather functions in the same manner as the "men in grey suits" do in the Conservative Party, i.e. quietly efficient when necessary.

Then I have moved offices (again, and I doubt I will get through this year without a second move). Although I am technically in an open plan office, I have got a good space almost private surrounded with 5'6"(plus) screens and two windows (I am the only non-section person with two windows to myself! I may as well make myself comfy, as living in packing cases is miserable and the last time I did that I stayed put for three years. They told me it was temporary and then did not succeed in moving us out. The only worse experience of office space I can remember is when I basically had a open office to myself (technically I was sharing with a very part time guy). The rest of the space was huge and housed junk! So I am not a fan of big offices, I just like offices with plenty of bookshelves. At present am succeeding in keeping it tidy. I still would like my white board up and to put up a couple of photos.

We have also got as far as I think I can take St. Andrew's sound system. In that we have now put permanent supports for both the lectern microphone and a back up pulpit microphone. Both of these are wired. It now means I need to get the instructions re-written for doing the sound on a Sunday. Cliff has also shortened one of the leads for use in the pulpit.

Then there was holiday. Driving up was good, I am slowly finding a good place to stop at on the way up. I went to suss out Caerlaverock WWT site. It looks good and I am hoping to see a Barnacle Goose at Christmas time. For those who have not known me long, my M.Sc project was on Barnacle Geese. I wonder what would have happened if I had decided when I finished that that I really wanted to do was to do the job I had trained for and become an Ecological Statistician. Certainly I would have had a very different but interesting life. Not grumbling, my present life is interesting enough but it is one of those paths not taken that I am semi curious about. I don't think it occurred to me that it was a serious possibility at the time, there is really only entry for about one person per year into that field and something that was that exotic just felt totally out of my reach. If I had, I probably would have worked abroad for several years and even my jobs in the United Kingdom may well have been in out of the way places.

Well by going there I have discovered there is also a National Nature Reserve and a RSPB site at Mersehead. If you add in the cross at Ruthwell it should be easy to spend a day there and break the journey up. Coming down I think will need to be a single journey with lots of stops. There comes a time when getting home to your own bed out weighs the length of journey left. Of course choosing a date is important.

We did many of the things that a week up in the South Rhins includes. That means at least one visit to the RSPB Site on the Mull with a stop at the Gallie Craig from something to eat, a trip to Port Logan Botanical Gardens (my parents also managed to visit the Port Logan Fish Pond which is a rock-pool that was converted to house fish indefinitely. Originally this was so the laird could have fresh fish when he wanted it, but now is used rather as an aquarium for North Atlantic species although I do not think they have either whales or dolphins. We went also to Ardwell Gardens (because I got them mixed with Logan Botanical and thought we could get lunch there) and also saw the Kirkmadrine Stones .

The Saturday was my birthday and Morag and the girls had gone to town making a birthday cake in the shape of a church. As Morag says it was a bit high for me. The service was at 8:00 a.m. and signs of stained glass. However there was a goodly sized congregation of Jelly Babies including one of the doing the sound system! Some photos of the tripe are on Flickr.

I think the highlight was the "folk" concert we went to. Not because it was good. In many ways the event was just totally wrong for us. Three people with hearing aids and the fourth having to put her hands over her ears because the music was so loud. The main reason others seemed to have come was for a change in drinking venue. However we spent the whole of the first half sending messages to each other using pen and paper! A waitress came around to ask us if we wanted any more drinks, we said no but some more paper would be nice! Other people were trying to talk regardless of the performance but I think ours was the only conversation where every word was "heard" by all participants. In the Irish sense the crack was good even though we would not have chosen either the event or the venue if we had known more about it. The music was not bad being a person performing pop classic ballads, just loud (it was getting distortion from the speakers so even those with good hearing could not hear the words). Yes I knew some of them so I am pretty sure of my classification.

Another find was getting a Zen Stone plus and an Audiax FM Transmitter, means I can have music on to lower thought distraction when driving (almost essential on Motorways). I find that CDs need changing and radios have talk which actually is too distracting. Having the random selection playing from a good portion of my music collection (I have not put on my Christmas and Easter specifics) means that I get flow of music while I am driving without problems. The one thing I have discovered is I am eclectic in my music choices. Anything from pop balladeers (Chris de Burgh, Bruce Springsteen), some Jazz, through Celtic pop (Clannad, Runrig, Iona), Christian Praise, classics (both Mozart and moderns including Part) to world music particularly Indian and Jewish. Very little is particularly mainstream but it does cover a wide range.

I got back on Tuesday and since then have been trying to sort out precisely where I am supposed to be (with things going on it is nearly three weeks out of general circulation). I spent Thursday in Birmingham at a meeting of my supervisor's research students. My Supervisor has just been promoted to chair of liturgical and congregational studies! I am glad for him after a tough year in which he has lost both his parents. He is also deputy head of school and moved back to Edgebaston campus!

I think that is largely everyone up-to-date with what is going on, I will need to send a couple of notes to subgroups of you tomorrow with specific news (as I am at St. Andrew's Sheffield tomorrow it will have to wait until then), by the way we are having harvest at St. Andrew's tomorrow, I think global warming has brought the Scottish harvest forward to September from One World Week in October!! Does anyone with curiousity out there know what the theologising* behind "He was a master builder" is