They call this quiet!

Right I think this will have to be a highlights writing again as life has been busy and I don’t think you want to read a book about what has been going on. Early part of the week before last was a mix between busy and down with a migraine catching me out on the Tuesday and have SRDS which is the annual personal performance review on the Wednesday.

Then on the Thursday it was off to Birmingham for a supervision. It was useful in a number of ways. Firstly even though I have not finished my placement I am now writing for my thesis. The writing before has been exploratory on the whole and I have tended to have based it around essay/article approach. This gives a very intense and immediate focus to what I write, however when I write for my thesis, the pieces are less focused. I am often putting a marker to say here is something that either needs to go elsewhere or will be written about elsewhere. I suspect if I get to writing a Reformed piety it will be rather different to other people’s yet people will recognise it as delineating the area. The reason being is that most people seem to describe as elements that must be there for it to be Reformed, I tend rather to see it as a sets of tensions and forces that have to be negotiated. The form is rarely totally dominated by a single group of thought and different strands include different elements. What makes them Reformed is that the negotiation takes place.

Friday was the breakfast and there were forty six meals served. I was whacked by the end of it but also was officially in work. At one stage Sarah and I had to set up another table so people coming in had somewhere to sit. It seems as if it is more popular in the summer when it is pleasant to get up and go outside but we are not sure. There also has been some grumbling about the Archer project.

Saturday Mum and Dad came over. Shopping list was as follows:

Decaf coffee, fruit, veg, soya dream all from Waitrose

Shoes, black flat with a high buckle strap for Mum

Mobile phone for Dad as his old one was switching on but not maintaining a connection. As you'd guess we spent quite a while going around the shops. Fortunately everything we wanted seemed to come fairly readily to had. O2 does a really cheap phone that has fairly clear buttons which Dad was happy with, Jones had a sale on where a pair of Ecco shoes in just the design mum wanted in her size were available. This was good as the combination is not usually very common in summer. We then made the mistake of going to Marks and Spencers for a drink. I forgot that the cafe is now on the second floor. This is not a good combination with my parents as there is no down escalator from the second to the first floor so with Dad finding going down steps more difficult these days I have to persuade him to use the lift.

Sunday was a very busy thesis day. Not only was their worship on the morning followed by church meeting but there was also Baptisms at 6pm followed by socialising. The people getting baptised were all church youth, who had been brought up in the faith. As part of the service they had the poem GodGazer which the two girls had found very meaningful. I found it difficult to connect with and I am wondering why. It is a polemical poem, my work is mainly descriptive and I felt at times that the polemic was allowed to break the poetic voice too readily or used as a “get out of jail free” card when he really should have worked harder at what his was doing. I don’t object to breaking the voice particularly the rhythm but you need to be doing it for a purpose and less is more. That said, I would also say two of the readers were under rehearsed and that that made it harder to appreciate. A performance by the author is also on the web Oddly enough though not directly inspired by this I think the next poem I take to writers group will be more polemical. There is stuff boiling around as well. Anyway the church was packed, about 50% from Herringthorpe and 50% friends and relatives, some coming quite a distance. The moderator Kevin Watson preached and there was a band, partly from musicians in the church and partly from friends who had come in. There were traditional hymns at the start and the finish but officially set to new tunes. Amazing grace at the start was at least in part, one of the verses was used as a chorus and was definitely sung to a new tune however I am not sure of the rest of the verses. The other one was Lord of all Hopefulness, which as far as I can tell was same tune but different accompaniment! However at long last I have seen evidence that my suspicion that there is new music I don’t know is correct. All the songs chosen by the young people to be sung after their baptism were new to me. At about 8:00 pm when the church was emptying I went home, the congregation went around to one of the parents/grandparents home and carried on partying until the wee hours of the morning. Facebook can be quite useful for fieldwork sometimes.

Officially this has been a quiet week. It certainly does not feel like it. During it I have been tackling a dataset for a student doing her masters in Human Nutrition. The problem was the sheer quantity of data and getting it into a form where she could hope to write a paper from it. The problem is that the data is electronically recorded and therefore it is easy to collect but the tendency is too collect too much.

I have also come across something odd. I sometimes been finding that I wanted a chocolate at the end of lunch and it was chocolate and not generally something sweet. I decided to try and see if coffee would do instead. I made filter coffee and see if that did. It did. So I presumed caffeine fix, until I read the packet and found I was using decaffeinated! So that rules that one out.

I am taking this weekend quiet. Friday was my study day and I started putting together the introductory paper for the study day next week as well as serve breakfasts (forty four this week). Yesterday I did some shopping. I bought a long armed stapler as I need it for putting the booklets together. I did a Wordle of my thesis but not exactly. I also bought a cardigan and a pair of pyjamas. All my current summer ones are comfy but old variety and I spending the night in Woodbrooke Hall before the study day. Today I have been in, largely due to the Race for Life being on in Sheffield city centre. What I have learnt is that going to my placement church on such days is a nightmare of logistics, it might well be quicker by train and bus.

Low Saturday Study Days

Wondered how far I got, having realised that the pace I was going up to Easter day probably meant migraine I took Tuesday as my day off last week hoping I'd get it over with. It struck on Tuesday night and went Thursday evening. Actually it needed something to trigger it and got that with water spilt on the train. So that wiped wednesday and Thursday out. Although on thursday I got my papers off for this months supervision.

What has this last few days been like. Well weather wise it has been cold mornings but sunny afternoons with a spring chill to them. Friday I was in work and going pretty well. Finally got all last years forms in for the Churches' Work with Elderly People about a thousand (over 950 but I cannot recall the exact number. Unfortunately I have lost some of the code from last year so am having to recreate it. I think there are definite types of task the Church's worker does that can be picked out. There is the one to one visit which may just be befriending but may require her special skills, there is the routine visiting either to residential homes, sheltered accommodation or for a few in their own home, there is hospital visiting, there is community activity and there are public meetings. It all builds up into quite a complex picture. Hopefully on Monday I will get an annual report out. This year hopefully Janet can put them straight onto computer and it will just be a matter of sending them across to me by email which should mean that the report can be done in a couple of days.

Went shopping at Waitrose in the evening basically as I had not done any household shopping since I think the 7th April and everything was getting low. I was rather relieved when my shopping only came to just over £50. Admittedly I did have to top up with things yesterday at the Station Marks and Spencer.

Yesterday I went with St Andrews Chesterfield on a BENDA. That stands for Bible Exploration North East Derbyshire Area (I think). It shouldn't be "area" it should be "cluster" as that is what they are officially called in East Midlands synod. The day was being led by John Proctor who I knew would be good so it was pleasant to go. In actual fact it was better from my thesis point of view than the East Midlands day last summer. I think because we did not have separate sessions but were altogether and also I think people were more relaxed. When the church is going somewhere and they hire a coach (actually shared with Rosehill and Holymoorside) then I get an early train across and walk up to the church. Yes I know it is more sensible to walk to Rosehill but not that much and certainly not enough to avoid any chatter while the coach comes. I always panic over train connections, the result of which mean that I was sitting outside the church for twenty minutes or more when there was quite definitely a chill in the air. The church at Matlock is a combined Methodist-URC with a distinctly Methodist flavour although they meet in the former URC building or I assume they do as there is a building slightly higher up the road with "The Old Methodist Church" above the door. I am not sure how they managed to get that above the door, or is their a segement of Methodists called "Old Methodists" . John was on form, we looked first at approaches to Bible Study, then a view of Marks gospel and finally onto two Corinthians. Two things of note happened. One was that John asked people to pick out sensory and emotional information from 2 Corinthians 4 and people gave him the ideas in the passage. Yes I kept silent for quite a while, my job is to listen really. Now I am an ideas person but I could easily find six or eigth of them in the passage. The second came when John asked was there anything that people wanted to cover and it was clear that most of the questions were about the organisation side of study groups. This is despite the fact that I think I could count a maximum of five ministers there (including retired ones) so no where near a full attendance from clergy but what do you expect if you choose Low Sunday. This was a group of lay people who were seriously asking how do we do this in practice. I got back to Chesterfield about 5:00 p.m. and was given a lift back to the station.

Today has been a lazy day as mid way through last week my interviewees postponed their interview until next week. The man had got talked into driving a train which I don't suppose was very difficult. I have slept in, had an afternoon nap, written up two Sundays in my research diary and photographed some Bluebells which are at present out in Wilkinson Street. This always feels somewhat serendipitous as the reasons they seem to thrive is basically they are in the grounds of businesses that don't fuss too much about gardening. They are basically wild. As they are so far from any native population of bluebells I really could not care whether they are native, Spanish or hybrid. My own guess would be hybrid as in the two close ups one looks Spanish and one looks native. I would guess that without interference in about five to ten years time we will have bluebells in Gell Street Park as it is a nearby suitable site. I stumbled across them a couple of years back but this is the first time I have taken a camera to photograph them. Unfortunately I just picked up Dad's which I am borrowing and the battery was really low so I did not spend as long as I would like.