After a week with rather more to cope with than planned

Right this week was more in it than I planned. There was a twofold reason for this. Firstly I had a cold last weekend and though not serious, I need more rest when I am under the weather than when not. Secondly there were builders in work knocking down walls and such. This is my idea of something that is best avoided but as I did not know until Friday I could not plan last week to make other plans.

Monday it was not too bad and I had writers group in the evening. This was a not to be missed evening as it was the rehearsal for our reading on Friday. However we rehearse on Monday and read on Friday, I for the life of me can’t get up the energy to prepare for the rehearsal as I would for the actual reading.They therefore seem to be surprised when I read much better on the night. This is ridiculous, I have been reading in church since I was around ten, I know how well I need to know a reading to read it well, whether it is a Bible reading or a piece of my own work and that really the actual preparation can only be done in the last twenty four hours.

Tuesday was down to Birmingham for a supervision, the weather was wet and blustery when I set out but by the time I had got to University Train Station it had stopped raining. I thought I might try and pay my fees in person, they having managed to at last bill me correctly. I want a bill before I pay (they usually bill wrongly to start with so paying an estimate whether right or wrong isn’t a good idea). I am actually now stopping following the alerts for new papers towards my thesis. Well I have not stopped them but unless something absolutely shouts at me I am ignoring it. That said there was an announcement on a book on Ethnography and Ecclesiology which has both American and British authors. I also need to trace at least one of the book my supervisor recommended which looks at Pentecostalism and Ritual.I have enough tangents to deal with already. What was also interesting was my supervisor and I had a post thesis chat. It is obviously time I started thinking about that. When it got to walking home I found the sun was shining.

Wednesday I had a migraine, actually I could have had it on Tuesday, but as it was supervision decided to cajole my system into working. Strong coffee and ginger seem to pretty well as a keep going if I have to, however when I woke feeling pretty rough on Wednesday I decided it was going to be one of those migraines which I could try working through but until I gave myself time actually have it I was not going to get better. The main problem with this was I needed time to get bright deep yellow paper for printing the programme for the reading on Friday. Two separate people had done the inside and outside of the programme, I just needed to combine it and print. I found a webpage that would combine two different webpages so it was just getting hold of the paper.

Thursday I made it back into work.The morning spent doing an analysis on drinks consumed in school. What seems to be happening is people are thinking that sugary drinks is mainly drinks like lemonade and coke. However there is a lot of sugar in many fruit based drinks which are seen as healthy options. On the afternoon spent quite a bit of my time with a doctoral student who is looking at green roofs and diversity with respect to time. I also printed off the programmes for the Reading the next day as I had taken the decision to work at home on Friday on thesis. I also met Cliff at lunch time to check the sound system situation. He has taken one aerial and two microphones to be fixed. We are therefore a microphone short. His view is that it is wear and tear but I am cautious.

Friday I went to Broomhall Breakfast, as this is a new academic year there are new volunteers and they are settling in. The result was for the first time ever I was mistaken for a normal breakfaster. I think I should have played along for longer but as it turned out, that was not the only mistake the volunteer was making and having a more experienced person to pick up on the other was what was needed.Then onto the doctors for a regular checkup. I got a bit worried when another doctor came out and said to someone else that my doctor could not see them that day did they mind seeing him. The idea of trying to explain why my medication was the way it was, what needed changing and what did not was going to be challenging within the consultation spell. However it must have been a one off as my GP was there and agreed to the changes I wanted. The rest of the day I had set aside for preparing for the reading and also putting together the desk with the idea that Saturday would then be free to study.

The readings went well on the whole. The room was full although it mainly seems to be family of other members of the group with one or two friends. There being about a dozen readers, then it is fairly easy to get forty people to an event. That said I did not manage to bring anyone but we shall see at other events. There were comments about how well my introductions to my poems worked. Again no rocket science, you want some hook for people to grasp where you are coming from and then a lead in. A hook is normally better if it is something personal they can connect with, a busy day, being scared as a child and so on. On the whole a good evening including going to the pub with other members of the group afterwards.

Saturday was a down day, I managed to shop in the morning and then slept but my brain would not settle all afternoon and I had an early night. I really should have just settled to reading, I suspect it was the come down from the previous week. Today I went to church as I was on sound duty and it was Jeremy Clines, the Anglican Chaplain preaching. His voice did not work well with the sound system but what he did was give more time to Bible readings so we got both the parable of the sower and the explanation, the whole of 1 Corinthians 12 and a good section from Job. Intriguingly in the parable of the sower what struck me that the seed was scattered on the bad soil. There was no careful husbanding it. A point that Jeremy then made. I wonder if we as churches have got too careful over where we scatter seed. That is we need to be prepared to sow in bad soil in order to get the harvest from the good soil.

On a dry day after much rain

Right, the supervision went well although I found it more tiring than usual, the travel just seemed to take it out of me. I was dodging showers rather than walking around in glorious sunshine but that said I hardly got very wet. Graduation seemed to be happening around Birmingham and there were quite a few people wearing gowns and having their picture took. An intriguing episode when I was going through possible papers for the thesis and a couple came in worried that their account had been deleted and therefore they could not access the email with the booking details for their gowns. I knew from experience how slow computing services are to delete such accounts, I can remember the caution that happened the first time we ever deleted any accounts. They had to not have been used for six months, not just the person had left the University. We are quicker these days but there is a generous overlap between finishing your course and your account being deleted. Anyway another chapter of the thesis has been placed as in main draft.

Then on the Thursday evening I went across to my parents hoping on the Friday to go to Martin Mere. It was quite late as I was teaching that afternoon and as it was my last day in work for the week I needed to also do the end of week tasks such as fill in my notes on what I have done that week and also write the work blog. So there were things to be done. Anyway Friday it rained, the sort of rain that you do not want to go out in and though it cleared towards late afternoon Dad was not going to be coaxed out of the dry comfort of his home although I think Mum and I were more up for it. So we spent the day inside, I had taken a bit of thesis work, mainly reading but I spent the day finishing an amigurumi sheep for a friends granddaughter. It is very different making something for a toddler and making something for an ornament. for starters I had to embroider the eyes and I was much more careful about finishing off. I put in the last of the ball of wool just in case the child does manage to pull something off as it is easily fixable with wool. The funny thing was when making it up rather than following the pattern I started thinking about how a sheep really do look and as a result the sheep had a much more life like face than the one in the book.

Saturday was fine and sunny! So we set off to Martin Mere . The journey there was uneventful but took us through Ormskirk as that was how the SatNav worked it out. The centre was by far the largest one I have been to since I went to Slimbridge while at Reading and I never really got to see around Slimbridge. There is a huge children’s playground just by the entry but it was pretty busy when we arrived and even busier when we left. The cafe was pleasant with a view overlooking one of the ponds. There are lots of ponds at Martin Mere. After coffee we went out to the nature reserve side as Dad enjoys watching birds in the wild. We saw a fair few waders and a couple of butterflies. I really do need to improve my recognition of waders. All right I got the Oyster Catchers but saw Ruff ( and did not recognise them plus other waders. I also think we might have taken the wrong set of hides for good views. We then had lunch and went to look around the collection for a bit. We really only saw about a fifth of the collection but we did get to see where the Beavers live and because we timed it for when someone is talking about beavers Mum and Dad got to feel a real beaver skin. However we did not get to see beavers as they are nocturnal and therefore not about when the visitors are there. You can see them on the Beaver Camera . Finally as we walked back we got to see the Asian otters feed. I bought myself a good quality pair of binoculars, something I have been toying with for a while and I am hoping to use them when I am up in Wigtonshire at the end of September/start of October.

We were I think all tired and though the journey back was straightforward and the SatNav decided to guide us through the back lanes of that part of Lancashire including through Parbold which was pleasant but the motorway was a major part of the journey and Mum fell asleep during it and woke feeling that she had been travelling forever when in fact it was only a relatively short spell of time, just over an hour. Motorways are monotonous and we were tired. I went home that evening so as to be able to spend Sunday working on my thesis.

This week has been quieter, with not nearly the same amount of travelling around. I saw Sarah for coffee on Tuesday. It was a useful point to catch up and think about how things are going. I think I have set myself a rather hefty challenge, in that I am going to try and write a set of short articles about Reformed Piety alongside the writing of the major chapter on Reformed Piety for my thesis. There is a tension in the Reformed Tradition between the normal inward looking nature of spirituality and the very worldly-practicality that is valued. We tend to ask what purpose do many of the spiritual practices of other traditions are and be highly sceptical when they seem to be concerned with the individual sanctity of the practitioner. In that sense the Reformed tradition actually agrees with James 2:14-25  although not seeing works as guaranteeing salvation, but rather as the necessary outcome of a lively faith. It should therefore be an interesting exercise.

Work is busy but nothing exciting at present. I am beginning to wonder what will happen at my annual review. It should be an interesting one, not because of the grade I expect but because I want to see what my boss has to say. My illness rate over the last year has been substantially lower than previous years and I have been noticeably more proactive. I suspect that because of when she start supervising me, she thought that my performance which was not bad was perhaps a bit slow for me but largely fine. There is a change and I know it and she will know it. Other than that I think I have drawn the long straw with the Royal Statistical Society chartership renewal, they have chosen to look at just the years 2012-2014 for me. Of course that is the time that will cover me getting my doctorate. I suspect it will be hard to argue that that does not constitute professional development.

This weekend I have spent mainly doing catch up on my thesis due to the fact that last weekend I was doing detailed analysis and did not get much written so not much news there unless you want to check my thesis blog . Today I went to church partly as I was doing the sound system. I seem to have a mild ear infection which made this interesting, as at times I was hearing an echo on the sound coming through the speakers. I checked with Ian Cooke and he did not hear this. The whole system seemed to be very sensitive indeed so I am wondering how much was due to the infection and how much was genuinely there.

On a wet Sunday Afternoon

A fortnight to report as I did not get around to it last week so I will try and do events based rather than a day by day account.

However the week before last was pretty mundane, the only problem was that work decided that it wanted me in early three days out of four. Therefore I was struggling to get my thesis writing done in a morning. I managed it before work on the Monday but Tuesday’s meeting was even earlier and I didn’t. I was hoping to get it done at night but was just too tired.The final one was on thursday and once again I managed it before work. It seems easier to move things around so I do it in a morning than to try and fit it in on the evening. However apart from these early starts the whole week was not overly busy. This was such a surprise to my brain it started having bright ideas. Whether any of these are any good will have to be seen but I have let other people know.  I also recorded a test for the NVivo course.

The other two notable things that happened that week are that my writers group started up again and I am glad to be back, even if I am tired in work on a Tuesday after attending on a Monday. It finishes as 9:30 which should mean I get to bed by 10:30 but it is anything up to midnight before I manage it. The other is Elle has started attending Broomhall Breakfast. She is one of Margo’s students and is looking at eating patterns with people at the Breakfast and from the Breakfasts point of view looking at its contribution to their diet. There are perhaps three groups. There are a group of people who are part of normal society if pretty marginal to it. Some are employed, quite a few are self employed, or work combining if you prefer or vulnerably employed. Then there are the drinkers, I suspect most of them are housed, they get by through camaraderie and sharing money for next drink. These are not employed. My impression at the moment is few of them are on anything stronger than drink.. Finally there are chaotics, who drop in, sometimes for several weeks but for various reasons attendance regularly is unlikely. These may or may not be housed.

The weekend was a writing one. That meant most of the time indoors but Stephen  from the Breakfast has an exhibition on at the Access Space He claims he never could do representative art but once he started working with geometric designs he has gone from strength to strength. If you have the chance just pop in and see.

The big problem over the weekend is my right hand started hurting from the use of the mouse. On Monday I went into work and it was so painful I was almost yelling out loud at time. It presented as a repetitive use injury, so I looked at the options and in the end decided to get a Bamboo Pen and Touch. I was not happy with the idea of using just a pen as that seemed to involve holding the hand in quite a cramped position and while I am happy to do that for writing, I am not sure I wanted to quite work a mouse like that. I was pretty sure due to where the pain was that most ergonomic mice which seem to be designed to take the strain off the wrist and I was not too sure about tracker balls. Well I am getting used to it. It is more different to work than I expected. Although they have programmed it to do the same sort of things a normal mouse does and more, they have also programmed it to do them in several ways. As I am finding this is essential as tasks that with a normal mouse seem the same, feel very different with a touch pad. However I was developing skill and the big thing was that my hand was not hurting any more. I am still debating whether I buy a second, at present my paln is to carry it between home and work.

Tuesday I was off to Birmingham for another supervision.The weather was dry and I even managed to sit outside in the sunshine after my supervision. The supervision was short but sweet, in that my supervisor assessment was at the top of my range  of where I was at. That meant a chapter could be put to one side while I got on with writing the next. More detail of where it is at can be found on my thesis blog. My supervisor asked me how the trains were and when I said fine he looked surprised. It turned out he had been using local trains that morning and they had been properly topsy turvy; whereas with my train coming at least from Newcastle if not Edinburgh and going onto Reading it had been little affected. The other thing was with the train to the University I just get the first available rather than worry about timetables as they are at most fifteen minutes apart.

I have finally got moving dates. The problem has been that I am not moving to Burnswick but to the Computer Centre. That meant I did not know whether the Brunswick move applied to me, or whether I was going to be timetabled as a separate move to happen between the two Brunswick move weekends. I also now know which office I am in. The result of the change around is I am going into my immediate bosses office unless something happens to change it, then it is the office next door. The other big advantage is for the first time since I started the job I will have a south facing room. I hope that that makes up for the closeness of the buildings opposite. I have asked for a big book case and three office chairs. It just suits my style of working to let a guest sit on an office chair rather than a table chair. Table chairs are lower than desk chairs.

Wednesday it started raining and although there were times on Friday and Saturday when you could get around without getting soaked, the threat of rain has been ever present. I was relatively unaffected until Friday morning, then after Broomhall Breakfast I came home to find that locally we were having another series of powercuts. However after an hour or so they cleared and I settled down to get on with things. Unfortunately that did not last. Just before 5:30 pm the power failed again. So I sat down and started reading. As it got darker I lit some candles and moved my reading position to the window. At 9:00 p.m.m I decided that I may as well go to bed, but just as I did the lights flickered very quickly on and off several times. The longest the power was on I had just got around to resetting all the clocks and was doing the last one and it went off again. The annoying thing was that everytime it went off smoke alarms from several flats would also go off. They would ring for a round half an hour. There was no point going to bed until they stopped ringing. Eventually got to bed, woke again at 3:00 to 4:00 a.m. when the lights flickered on several times briefly. However there was no power when I got up. I used my dongle and checked the internet and found it was not expected on to 11:30 a.m., so I replanned my day and went to Costas for an early coffee and then a leisurely shop around town. Got back around 12:30 but the power was still not on, was just checking to see how long it would be when it suddenly came back on. That was good news as the estimated time on the webpage was 7:00 p.m. Northern Grid also put a note through my door saying I was due a refund due to the power cut. We have had an awful lot of power cuts recently and I suspect the blue huts opposite on Broomspring Close have something to do with trying to fix it. This power cut seems to have done less damage than the one a month ago.

On Palm Sunday with cherry blossom on the trees

As it is a fortnight and I don’t suppose that you really want to spend the next couple of hours reading minutiae of my doings (acceptable in small quantities but not in large doses), this blog will take the form of lowlights and highlights.

The fortnight started slow, as I had been struggling with a migraine over the weekend. The ones prior to this I had managed to take a short nap and then get on, this time it was belligerent and my attempts to shake it off did not work. The result when I do this is that I get well enough to be active, I am active and pretty promptly the migraine returns, I call it cycling and the only way I know to get rid of it is to stop and have a day inside where I deliberately do very little. The problem is detecting when a migraine is this sort rather than the sort a quick nap will cure. The trigger for it was the relief at having a major research bid in by the deadline (well actually it happened on the following tuesday). If the bid is successful it will mean a lot more hard work but very interesting work as I seem to be a doing major translation work between different people in the group who submitted.

Then there was March’s supervision. I seem to be fairly fortunate with the weather for my supervisions and this time was no exception with a lovely sunny day. There was the cube for Bromford Dreams . Chris Shannahan is a research fellow and Methodist minister who did his doctorate under my supervisor. He would describe him self as a contextual/liberation theologian and has been studying the way that faith connects with those way beyond the boundaries of the church. Intriguingly earlier in doing this project Martin suggested he did Martin’s Ethnography course and that was the year I gave a talk on my experiences of ethnography. I have attended one of his Urban faith forums at Birmingham and we also ended up doing the study day on writing up together. If people are interested in Chris’ work he writes a blog called “Faith in an Urban World”. There is also a Facebook group for the Bromford Dreams. He is at present looking for funding to take it further.

Sometimes I wonder how I should describe my thesis in technical terms. The small area of study is find, it is Congregational Studies, but where does that fit in the wider view of things. I am in a student in a theology department and my degree is officially a doctorate in theology. My supervisor is in that department, I had to find a degree the department offered and as there was no precise fit I opted for the most general one. If I am theologian I fall very definitely into the practical/contextual sub group. However there are alternatives that I often seem to work as well with. I spend quite a bit of time dealing with liturgy, how it is understood and such. Others of more theologically evangelical views, looking at topics allied to mine would call themselves missiologist.Then there is the actual research tradition I am working in. That seems to be a lot more orientated towards sociology particularly sociology of religion and the actual methodology is straight ethnography (it is about the only thing where I am completely within a discipline and itself is part of the reason why this is such a wide ranging study) so I can also own the label social anthropologist which is technically my supervisors core discipline. This goes without adding that the other contributors such as psychology of groups and social geography. Any label seems to miss a whole lot of the complexity of what I am studying.

Saturday Mom and Dad came over. I decided that it was time we did something different than shopped at Waitrose and then wander into town on the afternoon to see to their other shopping needs. They use Sheffield rather than Manchester for quite a while. I think partly because it is smaller but also because I know my way around and can guide them. So we went out to Old Moor RSPB site by Rotherham. It was a foggy day when my parents came over and Dad was worrying that we would not see anything as the fog thickened as we went out there. I thought that if we got there, then we could at least have a meal at the cafe and a slow walk along the paths which are smooth and flat with the odd bird flitting by. However the sun came out as we arrived and we had a glorious day. We had lunch at the cafe, I thought mum had given her order so ordered it, but when she saw what I decided to go for she decided to go for that instead. So confusion reigned for while, but I just took the steak and mushroom pie that Mum had requested which was very good. We then wandered down one of the tracks. Did some looking at sparrow farm hoping to see yellowhammers but no luck. We did see sparrows, blackbird, a chaffinch and I think some bluetits. Then in the first hide we sat down. At first dad was thinking that there was nothing of interest there but as we settled we saw a little egret, some grey lag geese, goldeneye and gadwall. There were cormorants and coots having a tiff right in front of us at the next. Then we headed back to the centre for a coffee and cake before driving home. The day worked superbly, it had just enough activity for my parents to enjoy it. I also looked at binoculars and was surprised how much difference different pairs made. I am thinking of upgrading but probably won’t until September time just before I go up to Mull of Galloway after all I do most of my bird watching there.

Work wise I have two analyses finished off, just the checking of the papers to do. This leaves me a pretty clear desk at present, although I need to spend some time brushing up on Confirmatory Factor Analysis, a technique that I think is only available in AMOS and which I will need to build the models for if this user is going to do it. It is a sad story, the doctoral student got an statistician to do the analysis and they did a decent analysis, but unlike me who knows a wide variety of subjects they had no idea that some subjects ask additional questions. This person is right in the middle of one of those and needs to do it. However the statistician never sent them the data set. I just hope that they have they are good statisticians who never throw out data (you never know when you will be asked to reanalyse it) and therefore she can get hold of it, otherwise she will need to enter several questionnaires again.

I also need to get my head down with some NVivo course development. The document is basically written and I am going through and making adjustments to it so as to get towards a final version. I should start videoing after Easter (ugh!)

With being ill I missed writers group two weeks ago but made it this last week. We are now off until 16th April and then have another ten week term. I actually enjoyed this last term very much and it has given me more confidence to write poetry from other points of view than my own and/or the all seeing narrator. Doing a couple of fantasy pieces, one as Jack Frost and one about an apprentice was great fun. The poem from a close point of view I found much harder. The final piece of term was to write a monologue with internal thoughts and I have ideas for that, or something I want to explore where the monologue would be a good way to do it. Writers group is also thinking about doing some sort of web publishing.

Today being palm sunday I went to church. Sarah had asked me on Friday if I would be there and I said I would. She also asked me to be on standby in case a reader dropped out as she had a drama for the service. I hope she puts it up on the web as it was very good, if she does it will appear Worship section of St Andrew's website but Holy week and ministers putting up stuff on the web are not a good mix. There was also an URChin service beforehand and there must have been about a five or six families there. Anyway I ended up taking a part at very short notice. In fact neither Sarah or I knew I was taking it was time to read and the person expected did not come up. So very, very short notice indeed and I was working from Sarah’s script which was not the best. The other thing was it was Mary Stark’s ninetieth birthday yesterday and she was in church today. Christina had arranged for their to be birthday cake and bucks fizz after the service. There really seems to have developed a trend of having celebrations after church when members reach a significant milestone. Dr Sloane made ninety earlier in the month but had been ill at the time so there was no church celebration. The other noticeable change is people tend to sit down for coffee, I am not finding this easy to adapt to, I have spent probably thirty years drinking coffee after church standings and I really feel uncomfortable sitting down.

On a warm day at the end of February

Monday I can’t remember much happening at work although it was definitely busy. I did not manage to find the time to print my piece for writers group until the evening. Writers itself went well with the piece I wrote being given a good hearing. The weeks I enjoy are the ones when I feel at the end of the group session I know how to make the piece better. There is quite a bit of work to do on last weeks, particularly the middle stanza (which I had not really thought of as a separate stanza). I am struggling with the home work this week, I normally just do my own thing but this week I had a poem already drafted which would improve vastly if I could put it in the voice suggested for the homework. The trouble is that I am finding it a difficult voice to sustain in poetry, although it is one I have used in prose. The scene is not long enough for prose and does not lead anywhere yet. So it needs to be tackled in the poem.

Tuesday was busy, busy, first thing was a meeting at the medical school to discuss a bid proposal, then off to the Northern General to give a course in Primary Care on the use of NVivo. They had initially asked whether I could do it in an hour. It is a pretty solid two hours worth of teaching, and I mean talking. It is not my idea for a course, too compact, to heavy on my voice and dense, dense, dense. If I persuade people that there is a tool that could be useful for their research then I am happy, the real learning of the package takes place afterwards. I even miss out major areas which would be useful to any researcher but I don’t have the time. I basically have enough time to take them through the first few stages of a project and no further. I also should have been more careful as a number in the group had pretty bad colds.

Wednesday was again busy day at work and then I came home to prepare for the supervision the next day. Was sitting down to relax and answer emails, when I heard a pop and the lights flickered out. Went to check the fuse box and sure enough one had flicked, plus the bathroom light did not come on. I also spotted that my network did not seem to have come back, checked in the back room and found the router dead. However before I could do anything about it we were into a full scale power cut, with burglar alarms going off and no street lights. However my laptop switched to battery and I managed to find my internet dongle so ordered a new router to come on Friday, thinking I would spend Friday evening getting myself back connected. It also caused the hot water system to fail. This is not a big thing as most of the time I do not use it.

Thursday was supervision day but I awoke with the feeling of a blocked nose developing on top of a burny throat. However as it was supervision it was a go anyway day and the cold was only half heartedly there. The weather was warm, the sun shone and the train journey was smooth. Unfortunately my supervisor had to go and make a video in the middle of the supervision, so it was split into two sessions. The day was so warm that after the supervision I went to the ladies loo in order to remove a thermal t-shirt I had on underneath my jumper. I tend to dress warm for supervisions simply because I seem to catch fewer bugs if I do. I have quite a bit of rewriting to do especially around the theory of space. I will hopefully tackle it this coming week.

Friday I awoke and realised that whereas I had managed to pretend I did not have a cold on Thursday there was no way I was going to manage that on Friday, so I had to decide what to do. In the end I decided that taking Friday off work was probably the best although that meant not getting my router. So I have been surviving on my internet dongle. This has a limit on it that my router system does not. I suspect I am fairly well within it as my normal downloads are text based but I do not feel as able to use my router.

Yesterday I decided to try going down town but felt so rotten while out that decided that the best thing was that I stayed in the rest of the day and today. This was unfortunate as St Andrews was discussing its church profile at church meeting today (admittedly I had forgotten that until after the decision). However I have put the extra time into reading around space and realising that what I need to do is write some notes on sociology of place rather than space. I also need to develop the theorising in my descriptive writing. I am well aware that the two go hand in hand as, as one develops so does the other. The question that I am finding difficult is how much theorising/analysis apart from the broadly descriptive to put in my results sections and how.

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!

Busy at work, while keeping other things going

So what has been happening this last fortnight, well the first week was largely taken up with the extra classes for writers group (that and getting ready for supervision with a busy week in work). The thing being that I really needed two poems per week for three weeks. This is way above my normal turnover which is less than a poem a week with me using the holidays to get ahead so I don’t have to produce one every week. However with this being end of year, I had used up all my reserves during the year and had none to fall back on. So I needed to sit down and produce something, it took a while and at least one of the pieces I took one week and rewrote for the following week, but that was a major re-write and the tutor even commented on it. There are others who imagine that my short pieces are the easiest pieces to do, but in someways they take the most time as my imagination has to be clear to do them.

Work wise I am very busy, I suspect that I could easily fill a full working week if I wanted to but the only way to keep it sane is to try and limit it. Next week is already full with a little space the week after. I suspect things will ease at the end of August but I do not hold much hope before then.

Over the weekend I had the last of my general interviews for Herringthorpe and I am finding it harder and harder to stick to the interview schedule. The thing is the conversation around the interview is often far more relevant than the interview itself. I want the time to talk and the time to listen but the questions are really vehicles for enabling that and the tape recorder seems in many ways a positive hindrance. People don’t mind telling me things but put them on tape and they are not nearly as sure. Odd that as the point of having it on tape is so I don’t misrepresent them and the only people who may need to listen to the tapes are me and them. I have no plans for anyone else to listen. Anyway the couple are former missionaries of Pakistan and have done some work with Christian Asylum seekers in this country.

Last week with writers finished was slightly less frantic, but I had a supervision in Birmingham. My supervisor has sent me information on a study day in the autumn on liturgy and mission, from the same group that I went to the conference with last year. They must think they have not exhausted the topic. I will go to listen but at this stage in my thesis, I am not going to present a paper. I am too busy with writing up to my thesis to go through the process of preparing a paper. I appreciate the way my supervisor pushes me to actually think through what I am trying to say and find what is actually at the core of my thought. I was struggling with what was so special about church meeting. I have sat through enough to know that on the surface they appear meetings just like any other meeting but there was something about them that was drawing my interest and I had to work out what it was. It is a process not unlike that of poetry of going over and over the details until you find the key, the clue that attracts my attention, when I have that then I can build the argument around it just as when I know what I am saying in a poem I can build the description around that.The key gives the form to the whole thing.

Friday was busy, there were once again over forty for breakfast, I suspect that Olly who came to cook had not really been aware of the increase in number (it changes the organisation of cooking somewhat if you know that there are going to be over thirty for breakfast all wanting bacon). We discovered one of the guys was celiac when he brought special bread in. This is not a problem as once we know we can check provide the bread and make sure he does not get flour.Then came home and slept before going into work. If I am up about six to get to the Breakfast my body quite likes to sleep once it is over. At work I had managed to double book. I suspect because of diary changes and the prior problems with my diary, but fortunately had kept the last slot of the week free so that I could sort things for the following week. So I apologised and saw the person then. Then after work it was a trip down to Waitrose to get Minicol cream cheese for my parents, only there wasn’t any, but there was Minicol hard cheese and Benecol soft cheese that also was low in cholesterol. However Waitrose knew I was coming shopping for my parents as it did not have any decaffeinated coffee beans on the shelf. Then change around and catch the bus to the Dicksons, only I only had a £20 note and I realised I needed to buy a bus ticket, so I popped into one of the convenience stores and spotted they had Baklava  that was similar to what I had been given some weeks earlier so I bought a packet and then remembering Mum was back on strict orders from the diabetic nurse I gave it to the Dicksons.

Saturday I went over to my parents. Apart from only starting slowly the trip over went smoothly though I was tired when I got there. Dad was also tired having had a somewhat disturbed night so both he and me went for a sleep on the afternoon. Then around 4pm he suggested a walk and I managed to persuade them to go to Reddish Vale, I drove as Dad was worried over finding parking places although he had to direct me. The first car park was full but the overflow had several spaces in it. I am encouraging them to try and go there about once a week for their afternoon walk as it is only a couple of miles away and really quite a pleasant place to walk. They have a small cafe open between 1pm and 4pm as well as what looks like a better quality one at the nearby farm. However there isn’t easy parking there and it is a bit of a walk from the country park. I think the highlight was that there was a greylag goose but Mum was quite thrilled with the banks of Jumping Jack Balsaam or Himalaya Balsaam which were flourishing in huge quantities along the river Tame at the time fo year.

Today has been spent with rather quietly with my parents. They decided they were staying home in the morning and only going to church in the evening. At around 12:30 Dad decided to show me a A6380 as it came into land at Manchester. Never mind that I had actually seen it the day before when I came into Stockport. Anyway they dropped me off so I caught the 4:54 p.m. train back to Sheffield.

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.

So busy I almost did not have time for a migraine

This week has been busy. Monday saw me in work early for an appointment with Margo and Toni, but Toni failed to turn up so we decided to change to looking at some work for Hilary. Only the work for Hilary threw a wobbler on us. It gave an unwanted result and when we unpacked it, it was obvious that we would need to analyse as two cohorts to explain what was going on. The biggest surprise was that it was showing a difference between ex-smokers and non-smokers. This is something that is totally counter-intuitive. The accepted wisdom is that as soon as you stop smoking your health starts recovering. On the afternoon I saw my boss for a monthly review and then it was writers group on the evening. The new light at the corner of the church is confusing us as it seems to switch itself on and off (well I have not found the switch). It keeps being suggested I should produce a pamphlet of poems but I just feel as if that is too much work at present.

Tuesday I saw Margo and we sorted Hilary’s analysis. It was not as tidy as I would have liked but as it was done in two hours that was the best I could do. My PC at work is also bugging me as it regularly hangs for no apparent reason. I know some of these times it is due to downloading over the internet but it really can be appallingly slow. On the afternoon I went over to see Kate, she is in education and is doing a project for a major art gallery on working with young artists. They wanted a pictorial presentation of the findings and my job was to show Kate how she could go from NVivo to the start of a pictorial presentation. What I suddenly realised half way through was here was something at which I was going to be rather good at. Not sure if I can produce these for my thesis. My supervisor would be highly supportive if I did, but I am not that far down the line. In the evening I was across to Herringthorpe for a Bible study.

Wednesday was quieter in work. I only had a query from a doctoral student from dentistry. These days these are the easy to do, although I know when I started that they used to produce interesting challenges. Things like people being interested in variability rather than absolute results. Dentist are culturally interesting; they are precision freaks, measuring everything several times and normally the biggest challenge is to sort out what level of variation is relevant to the particular difference. The evening it was time to go shopping and to get ready for going to Birmingham the next day.

Thursday I was off to Birmingham. It was a showery day but I seemed to have a good day for missing them. Supervisions tend to be huge moral boosters. I go in feeling as if the stuff is getting out of hand and come out feeling as if it tameable. Maybe that is a sign of a good supervisor. I need I think to tackle Jonathan Edwards on the Religious Affections next, well there is that and hymns. I also found a paper that looks as if my spatial models may be fairly well developed in America for Congregations, this is useful, especially as I seem to have most of the books and read quite a few. The chapter on space is coming along quite nicely apart from the fact it would be useful to find some text on a Reformed understanding of space. There is little there, although I have found some with respect to worship.

Friday was a day of happenings. Firstly I turned up at the Breakfast early as I had a 10 a.m. appointment, to find 18 or more hungry breakfasters and a short staffed kitchen. We got out another table as all the seats were already full and I did some time on the hatch. Shortly after me Kay came in and she had slightly more leeway but again needed to be off before the end. Then into work to see Ahmed and Alireza about study I had done. They wanted different estimates. In actual fact I had them although my computer was going slow so I only got one set out. I have another two or so to do. That evening I went to pick up my regular prescriptions from Boots. They are in charge of re-ordering. The only thing was that the prescription had not been dealt with so it was a matter of waiting while they rang the surgery for them to fax the prescription, then prescribing it and finally getting it filled. It was by then so close on closing time that the security guard was offering me free sandwiches. They had a number of sandwiches that were on their sell by date so if I did not take some, they would just go in the bin. However by the time I got home my head was definitely having a headache.

I woke up on Saturday without a headache but feeling out of sync with the world, as if it had spun a half degree further than I had. Anyway I got up and went into town but then messed up paying in cheques at the bank. At which point I decided that my brain was probably still fuddled and the headache was probably a migraine. Anyway shopped at Marks and Spencer and then caught the tram home on the grounds that I was not safe to be out. The shopping only came first because it was groceries for the weekend and no I could not face the walk up to the Co-op (Somerfield). I then went back to bed and slept for two plus hours. Why I could not do that first thing in the morning I do not know. Anyway sorted interviews from Chesterfield and know what processing I need to do to get them ready for sending out. In the evening Stuart came around and we went out to the Devonshire Cat. It was pleasant enough but they had music on and conversation tended to boom.

Today I was at Herringthorpe for morning worship, first time since I reported as I was at my parents last weekend. The feedback was actually very positive. One person apologised for not staying, another asked for a copy of the handout (all but one were taken on the day and I did about 45 which was 5 more than Pauline suggested) and then one person totally unsolicited said that I had got it very accurately. With my supervisor being impressed with it and saying that I had not only got the important things in I had also got the balance exactly right. I think I am counting it a success, of course it is a real success if it actually changes things.

Two Weeks trying to get back into an even pace after Easter

I am going to need a long memory to remember back to the Easter bank holiday, I expect because it was fairly quiet.. Work was quiet with a lot of people taking advantage of the two double bank holiday weekends but I still ended up with plenty of work to do.

So will you excuse me while I move quickly onto that Thursday which was a supervision date in Birmingham. The supervision was as early as I can really make in that it was at 12:30 and the first train I can travel on gets me in at 11:30. Yes it is only a fifteen minute walk from the University station but I don’t like to arrive anywhere with less than an hour before an appointment if I am travelling by train. The campus was being host to a large number of school students who were taking advantage of the unseasonably warm weather to eat their packed lunches outside. My supervisor had two more theses bound upon his desk. He is supposed to be rationalising the number of students he supervises as the central system noticed suddenly he had far more than they expected staff to. This might not totally be his fault, he had when I started inherited rather a lot of students from a former colleague who had left to work elsewhere. He also has a fair number of students who have been in the system for rather a long time. Then the two students graduating may well only reduce his numbers by one as one of them was seriously thinking of returning for a doctorate.Anyway the result of having a fairly early supervision meant that I spent a fair time checking papers and still managed to get the 4pm train from Birmingham New Street and therefore bought myself a meal from Marks and Spencer and walked home.

On the Friday my parents came over. We did not do anything spectacular. My hairdresser was open so I had my hair cut and there was a street party on the road outside the shop. Not really your traditional sort of neighbours all joining in, rather a group of market stall holders got together to put up some tables and people could buy food off the food stalls and eat it at the tables, I think there probably was a TV screen up somewhere and there were other stalls selling stuff. Maybe even a small stage. However the hairdresser informed me that there was a flower market on in town so when I had collected my parents from the coffee shop in West One and then wandered down. The market was a general one although there was a large area selling plants. Anyway Mum bought a decent macaroon and a not so good chocolate brownie.

Saturday was a quiet day. That is my decision was to basically havea normal Saturday and to try and start putting together the presentation for Herringthorpe. Now there was an alternative. I could have decided to go the Herringthorpe Royal Wedding party, but that just seemed like too much for me. I believe it was a really splendid affair and the photos which I saw on the following tuesday seemed to indicate many people enjoyed themselves.

Sunday last week was very hectic. There was church in the morning which had quietened down somewhat from the pre-Easter frantic activity, but still a good turn out. Then I nipped home to get lactase tablets as I had forgotten to bring them, what I did not realise was I also needed to change. Then it was off to have lunch with a family. This family has been missionaries in Pakistan and are still in contact with the Christian community out there.After talking with them it was clear that the problem is not so much the blasphemy law but a societal behaviour that makes people over zealous for the honour of Islam and where the slightest suggestion that you may have done something dishonouring will lead to mob violence. This plays into the hands of the unscruplous, who can make allegations without really having to face consequences if the are wrong. Afterwards dinner which was delicious, we went for a walk around Uley Reservoir which is pleasant place for a walk. There was a cott with chicks just by the nest. Some of the chicks were in the water and some were on the nest. The coot seemed to be adding extra material to the nest, I wonder if this was to accommodate her growing family. There was also thousand of tadpoles at the side. As we past the boating house the girls heard wind chimes. This reminded me that Stuart had told me the previous evening that he had been out to visit a friends grave there in a woodland cemetery.

After that I went home changed and then back out as evening service had been cancelled so one of the normal attenders was having a social at her house. The main topic of conversation when I arrived was the Royal wedding, both the actual event and the party the day before. The hosts son and a friend who is the son of head of the local Christian Homelessness Project were playing in the back garden. They had “put up” a tent intending to sleep in it and got bedding down from the sons bedroom. However I would not have put much money on the tent staying up and the father of the visiting lad had said he would not spend the night outside.

At this point I felt that was enough socialising for me plus presentation was calling but the next day a group was also going out to Rufford Country Park. So Monday was spent in largely being fairly quiet indeed I had over done it and as much of the presentation as I would have liked did not get done.

Tuesday I was in work and had a very bitty day. nothing major, meeting in the morning, a missed appointment in the afternoon and four papers fighting for attention including one on which I am sole author. My liturgy paper should be in Anaphora I am glad to have done it. Then there was house group on the eveing. One of the leaders defined being spiritual as being Christian, that is not how the word is used in wider society!

Wednesday brain through a wobbler and I had a migraine which was most uncomfortable. I am used to the sort that lands me in bed and asleep pretty quickly but this timeit just made everything uncomfortable.

Thursday I got through a major analysis but I still have to write it up so will have a go next week. Then I will have to see if the student can make any sense of it. Otherwise an uneventful day with nothing much to report.
Friday I think I broke the back of the handout for the presentation. That might sound odd, but I had to find something to put my thoughts in order. Too many ideas not enough narrative. I have lots of ideas of ways to put across themes, it is just putting them into a form where I can present. I actually am finding publisher more useful for doing that than anything else. Part of the problem with Powerpoint is some of the visuals are not computer based and are better presented by other means but powerpoint does work for things that are computer based.

Saturday was quiet and fairly productive. It almost fell into a routine with two hourly slots. Cooking 9-11, shop 11am-1pm sleep 1pm to 3pm PhD work 3pm -5pm and so on. It was quite funny how the pattern appeared out of nowhere.

Sunday is today and I spent this morning watching the Sheffield Half Marathon. I’d checked the route yesterday and it was situated in such a way that I had two choices, set out half an hour at least early and see if I could find a way around it through Sheffield back streets (it ran from Don Valley Stadium to at least Hunters Bar on the Ecclesall Road through the centre of Sheffield. It was like having a major line drawn between me and Rotherham. It also closed the route north to the M1. Well as Jon the youth and children’s worker at Herringthorpe was running I thought I would go and watch it instead. It really is quite impressive to watch with the hordes of runners taking over an hour to pass once they had got to Devonshire Green.

Preparing for Supervision during Holy week

I thought I would start this weeks blog off with something different so here is a picture. These are primroses that are at present in flower in Gell Street Park just close to my flat the picture was taken this morning on the way to church.

Monday seems a long way a way. The day was unremarkable, although I saw my boss at 11:30 which would have been the first time in about six weeks, other than passing in corridors or on the road, these two are infrequent as she works in a different building to me. We quite often buy each other coffee at these meetings, she started it. Oh the really good news is that actually I am now off being watched for the number of days off sick. I spent the evening with my writers group in The Frog and Parrot. The last time we were quite a crowd and it worked well despite the music. This time however when the music was turned up with their being fewer of us, it drowned the conversation somewhat. Neither myself or Neil the leader particularly like talking against background noise. However they did put on hits from the 1970s so at least quite a few in our group recognised the music.

Tuesday I was off work and writing, I managed to finish the essay about lunch time, but I agree as Ruth commented that it is a heavy essay. I suspect any of the three or so ideas in there could have done with a full essay on their own. It is part of thinking myself clear about the Reformed tradition and is basically my defence for putting up what I know to be a limited and personal account of that tradition. Basically I suspect that to do an authoritative account is such a major piece of work that it is beyond the scope of any doctoral student and probably would need to be a collaboration between a wide number of scholars from a variety of subjects and with differing perspectives. So not even one persons magnus opus. This is particularly true when you move outside the debates of theology.

Wednesday I was busy sorting out the exercise dataset. The previous set of results had given back an answer that was the wrong way around. As this particular result was maverick, it took me some time to track down what was going on. The answer seemed to be that it was not directly about quantity but when the carbohydrate was eaten on the day of the race.

Thursday was last day in work. Spent the morning discussing the data with the guy in charge of the exercise then finished the book; Resonate by Nancy Duarte . It is very good, it talks about giving presentations and before anyone thinks of it as about slides, one of her examples used is a sermon by a Presbyterian Minister John Ortberg. So forget slides, this is about communicating a message and putting in appropriate emotional content. I am going to try and apply some of it when I give my talk at Herringthorpe.

On the evening I went out to Maundy Thursday service at Herringthorpe. It was a communion service but the Methodist Minister decided to lead the first part with a presentation on the Jewish Seder. Not an actual seder but to present elements of the seder. What really surprised me was that Pauline had never been to such a service before. He also wanted to know who was the youngest. There was another woman there who has been coming to the church for about six months. Now I knew without a doubt that she was a good deal younger than me, but even Pauline would not accept that. So we had to go into declaring ages. I am thirteen years her elder. I am wondering how much this age thing has played into their perspective of me. As I was at in my mid thirties a lot of what they suggesting would have been a lot more appropriate, although i also acknowledge that the person I was in my thirties was even more highly strung than I am at present, but in my mid forties I am far more settled and formed in my own mind.

Friday was busy. Broomhall Breakfast had been rather struggling staff wise the previous week due to the Archer project closing on Friday, as it was closed again this week, I volunteered to be a general extra person around the place. I turned up just before 8:00 a.m. to find no Ollie and no Sarah (buses were running a Sunday service hence her late arrival). There were plenty of kitchen staff, five I counted including Mary. However I could not see any of them doing in front of counter jobs, so I took and served over thirty breakfasts between 8:00 am and 10:00 am. Then helped set up for the Good Friday service. Photocopying extra service sheets and setting up the projector. I stayed for the service as did about three other people from the Breakfast (not including Sarah and Sam who had to). This was rather than heading across to Herringthorpe to help hand out hot cross buns with serviettes and cards which explain about Easter. I went to bed and slept for an hour or so, then got up and got the papers ready to send to my supervisor.

Yesterday was quieter. I shopped in the morning and then tried to copy CDs of interviews I have done so I could send them to people. However the drive was faulty and when I went out there was a black cloud and thunder rolling around. So I went in, switched off my computers and got my coat. Then went into town to get a drive. On the way back it came down pretty heavily. At one stage I took shelter under some bushes hoping it would go over. This was a mistake as it then took to hailing and the stones were the size of sugar cubes and stung when they hit me. I don’t think I have any bruises but I have not checked.

Today I went to the morning service at Herringthorpe. Pauline has developed a tradition of throwing what I suspect was originally cream eggs but this year was just bars in chocolate, into the congregation. However she wanted to make sure the children had them first so they had to come out and collect theirs although she gave Henry (96) one as well. It is funny as it loosens the congregation up a lot and generally gives a good shuffle space. I think that the blessing of water the Orthodox way may have a similar effect if they are liberal with the sprinkling of water. I guess it is something like when a congregation laughs wholeheartedly.

On the way back I unfortunately hit the curb at quite a pace and ended up with a flat tyre. I pulled in at a bus layby not thinking to pull in on the side road to check. I then went to ring the car company on my mobile only for that to be dead, I think my mp3 player also discharged at that point, which all seems somewhat odd. So I had no choice but to go looking for a phone. Unfortunately there was no a public phone at the shops just up the road, but I saw a man clipping his hedge. He lent me his mobile and then when it was clear that the company was going to take a while to get someone out, he offered to change the tyre and I accepted. Unfortunately I was unable to ring back to tell them from his phone. However at that point my brain had calmed down enough to realise that it might be a connection that was causing my phone to blank. I took out the battery and jiggled around the sim and memory card and then put back in the battern and suddenly it was working again.

Supervision in the midst of a cold

Right this has been a mixed week. I really have little recall about Monday, I went to writers group and took a poem which I wrote when I was playing. This was a one off and when I say playing I mean playing, I was building a tent in my main room made of blankets and clothing horses. Something I used to do a lot of as a kid, and this one evening decided to do so again. What was interesting was how other writers picked up both the child and the adult in the situation.


Tuesday I was struck down with another cold lurgy, I decided to take the day off and as I was going to Birmingham for a supervision the next day I felt staying in was sensible. Actually on the Wednesday the lurgy was kept under control quite well with cold supressants and caffeine. If only the previous one had been so amenable! I have covered a lot of ground this last month, I am still stumbling for a language, metaphor or analogy to use to explain what I am covering. I am thinking that I will probably end up talking of technologies within the Reformed Tradition, meaning technology in the Foucauldian sense (must read Discipline and Punish the birth of the Prison because I suspect we are adopting “softer” technologies of that sort). Actually I suspect society is moving towards softer technologies so it is not surprising that the church is. However what is it a technology of, I alternated between being a technology of self (see Weber) and a technology of faith. Other options considered are culture, (I would say many of the current technologies are cultural but to call them culture seems wrong, something to do with the relationship between culture and the individual), spirituality (in the sense the way to be a Reformed Christian, what sort of behaviour is expected), tradition (how is the Reformed nature of the congregation created in this setting and why is it Reformed and lets say not Anglican), ecology ( how do things work in this setting). However by the time I got home on Wednesday (I actually spent quite a time after the supervision working through papers, some interesting but when will I get around to reading them) I was caffeined out (i.e. taken in as much caffeine as I could) and still not feeling if I had the energy for getting home. So I decided that treating the next day as still cold was probably essential.



 
Friday I was at the Broomhall Breakfast, I picked up an email on the morning from Sarah saying would I do a computer consultation at breakfast. It actually turned out to be a misunderstanding. The reports were Excel spreadsheets but because they had been called reports Janet’s supervisor had thought that they would automatically given him the figures. This had never been as far as I know in the work flow. The workflow was for the data to come to me and then that to be turned into figures, the advantage being that I can turn around data in about 24 hours if I don’t have to enter it. If I enter then at least a week is needed. Ah well. I also went into work. Not sure I did much more than catch up but anyway.

Saturday I had a quiet day, shopped, mainly food. I also realised that I have spent around £250 on books with Amazon this last month. I know that is a lot, not all those are for reading, some are background reference but when someone in one book refers to another I need to be able to trace. Often it is only sections of books. A lot of what I am buying are scans of out of print books. However it was good to have a lazy day.

Today worship in the morning was all age and very noisy parade service. At one stage they had us singing along to a CD that was so loud I had to cover my ears as it was painful, alright I was directly beside a speaker but a bit lower volume would have been a good idea. Had an equal opportunities moment, there was a dramatised session on Ruth and I think they had not managed to find anyone to be Orpah’s husband. So they asked who was willing to hold someones hand look blissfully happy and then die a horrible death on stage. The only volunteer was a girl scout who is regular member of Sunday School. So we had the story of Ruth with a civil partnership!  Then back again this evening for a session on being guided by the Holy Spirit. Now was the Holy Spirit guiding this morning if so why did  the Holy Spirit let people forget to have a technical rehearsal? Oh the imponderables of life.

A positive whirlwind of a week

Right lets see, this week has been eventful but largely pleasant. Monday the big thing was that I was in work. That may seem odd but if I am going to get a migraine then the usual time is shortly after time of the month, for this month I worked out that that was the last possible date for it to happen.

Also over the weekend I posted the following blog post  in response to something on Facebook. It was one of those occasions when I felt compelled to respond to something due to who I was in contact with on Facebook. I function so often as if I don’t have mental health distress, that I suspect that people hearing about it, may consider me lying. I certainly in my public behaviour don’t fit the stereotypes and as my health has been improving recently I do so less and less. This as a rule makes me less and less willing to talk about it. The last thing I want people to think is that because I can cope with what I can cope with that other people with mental health distress should as well. However it comes differently when someone is feeling isolated due to mental health problems. It is however always nerve wracking when you reveal something like this and I wondered what would be the outcome. However that piece did all I wanted it to do.

In work this last week I have been working to do the final analysis of Butyrate paper so that it could be put into a presubmission draft. Hopefully by the end of this week the main author will have got it into a form where it can be submitted.

On Thursday I went down to Birmingham for a supervision for my PhD. My supervisor moved it forward to 12:30p.m. as he wanted to get home to be with the dogs as his partner was away or that was partially a front. I suspect that with last times supervision being rushed due to management issues at the University he decide that this was not going to be a single hour supervision. It is one of the very few times I have ever had claustrophobia at the end of a supervision, but as that is my usual response to when big things happen. The supervision resulted in a major realignment of my doctorate, the reasons for this is good, it plays to my strengths in thinking theoretical, it builds on  a long term sociological debate in a positive way. Sociology for a long while has been divided between those who are big theorists who see everything as determined by society; on the other hand are those who see everything as determined by the freedom of the individual. My study now becomes a look at the way a particular grand narrative (Reformed tradition) is played out within two specific instances(congregations) and I suspect to show both form and variability, or if you prefer a renegotiation of the Reformed tradition in two different locations. The snag is of course although I am thoroughly Reformed, much of my knowledge of the tradition is tacit, this is not surprising, much of the tradition is spread tacitly. However I need to turn it into explicit knowledge. What is more as the part of the tradition I am interested in is the pragmatic part rather than the doctrinal, it is perhaps better to refer to this as Reformed Spirituality rather than doctrine. Snag, Reformed tradition is activist as such has a suspicion of spirituality which is often associated with more meditative/contemplative traditions. So it is not pick up half a dozen books and read, but a careful working through of Reformed classic, descriptive portrayals (both fictional and factual), reading prayers and sermons by particular leaders asking all the time “What does it say here about being Reformed?”

Friday I went to the woman’s night at Herringthorpe. It was a Wii night which nearly always embarrasses me as somewhere in the last twenty years I seem to have picked up some coordination that I lacked when younger, or other people have drastically lost theirs because I actually seem to do above average on them. A third possibility is the Wii was designed by geeks who set it for geek level coordination and everyone else is too coordinated.

Last two days have had a cough with a sore throat, which has kept me in, partly in an attempt not to spread it but also so as to keep the infection as short as possible. It may at last be on the withdrawal stage as I seem to be coughing less and I don’t think my throat is as sore. Surprisingly when compared with recent colds it has not landed me in bed for most of the day as well as the night. So I have been using it to get on the reading on the Reformed tradition. So far I have read “Letting God be God” by David Cornick and am reading “Living the Christian Life: A Guide to Reformed Spirituality” by Robert H Ramey Jr and Ben Campbell Johnson and “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson which is supposedly a letter written by an elderly Congregational minister in 1957 to his young son which tells his life story.