End of Another Year and I am still doing Thesis

Well I admit that most of this week I have taken off, but I still needed to get some work done so I came back from my parents on Friday and have spent quite a bit of Saturday and today working on the flows chapter.  The result is that chapter is back in supervisor draft, and I now have the challenge of getting through the three data/ethnographic chapters.

I was not needing to alter the argument within the flows chapter, but I was needing to incorporate the thinking of Zygmunt Baumann on liquid nature of modernity and on Pete Ward's take on that. Actually this did the thesis some good as at one point I was wondering whether they were working in the same way as me. There does seem to be a tendency among Social theorists to skim the surface of the metaphors they use. My experience in writing poetry is that a metaphor really starts to work when you begin to understand it. The better you understand it, the better and more illuminating it is as a metaphor. Indeed the care with which I have invested in understanding the metaphor and how I am applying it is paying dividends. I was sitting down with Pete Ward's book when he asserted that if we changed the way church was organised we could still keep the gospel as it was. However, I had already looked at the relationship between ideas and people and realised that these are different takes on the same problem. So if you organise church differently, you reorganize people encounter with the Gospel and therefore the Gospel you proclaim. I suspect it is this realisation that is at the heart of the need to restate the Gospel in Reformed thought. If a society reorders itself then the terms change their meaning so you need to rethink the formulation. It is not that there are not references, but that the magic blanket of language that allows us to do so many things slips quite easily.

Anyway I had to work the whole thing through and am now pretty happy with the chapter. It is making an argument and I think that works.

Now I have to get on with the ethnographic/data chapters. Come Monday morning I will need to sit down and do quite a bit of work on focussing. The idea is to use the chapters not only to describe aspects of the placements but to focus on aspects of the tradition and also aspects of the metaphor. The conclusion of each chapter then becomes crucial as it should pull together these aspects from within the chapter. I however need to spend quite a bit of time thinking this clear. It would be nice to have one to one mappings but I somehow doubt it.

Almost stopping for Christmas

Parcels for posting and Christmas reading

Well I did not write last night but then I finally got my tradition chapter of my thesis sent off to my supervisor close on midnight. Now I am not expecting him to read it until probably late January at the earliest, maybe February. However, I wanted to get it out of my in tray so that when I get back from Christmas I can have a good go at getting the flows chapter into final form.

Even with finishing so late it took a lot of effort to get there. I started using Pomodoro technique on Saturday to increase my production rate as Christmas and remains of cold had hit it the previous weekend. I also wanted to go to a party on Saturday night. A friend M holds a fantastic Christmas party every year. It includes elements of young person's birthday party as her son's birthday is around then, get together of families to share a meal (chilli made in huge quantities and served with rice) and Bohemian drinks party. Finishing with an intimate group of friends who sit around the table and chat sociably until the small hours of the morning. It is very inclusive and very relaxed. The late night sociability with friends is something I have rarely done since I came to Sheffield twenty years ago and felt good.

So I started, and I got to the stage where there was just one section that needed working on. So I went to the party, stayed later than intended. My decision was to sleep out and then get on as best I could. So I was rather surprised to get up after five hours sleep and find myself ready to work on my thesis.

However, yesterday was a long haul. It took me to lunch time to finish the section, and then I had to check the Grammar and do the bibliography. I have not found a good way to move references between Scrivener and Word. So what I do is to put in Scrivener enough detail (normally authors surname and date plus page) to hopefully find reference in  Mendeley and then when I switch to Word I go through and check it all through very thoroughly and put in the references.

This was hard going for the chapter on tradition as there are at least twice as many references as their are for any other chapter. This is because the autoethnography has been done by me interacting with the texts from and on the tradition. Actually this chapter is still very clearly work in progress. If I get to getting it published it will definitely be one chapter that needs a lot of work. Actually it will need to break into at least two chapters just to deal with the stuff that is in their. Did you know Calvinist/Puritans/Reformed used to view science as a spiritual discipline and an act of devotion to God? Just one of the odd facts I pulled up yesterday while reading up on Dissenting Academies. They taught science because that is how they understood it, not because of commercial applications. If you wanted a commercial education there were plenty of other schools offering that, and they were cheaper too.

Oh I also have cheated, I tend to use Wikipedia not as a source of information but as a place to say "this is not just me".  That is things I know, but I can not document where I know them from. My father was employed there, and while he was there I picked up in general conversation this fact, really is not reference. My supervisor does not like Wikipedia in academic work, so he suggested I took a reference from Wikipedia. Well yesterday I found myself with no other alternative to Wikipedia but to take it reference, fortunately to a source which I a pretty sure does actually give the information given.

I have a big question, why has the Reformed tradition lost confidence in its spirituality. The more I read both historical books in the tradition and also accounts of the tradition it seems that we had what many would say was a well developed spiritual industry about a century and a half ago. Since then we have been persuaded that we do not have one! It is rubbish, when people put the Reformed tradition down for being "anti" then I nearly always can be sure that far from being anti, we have been particularly pro.

Anyway largely stopping for the next few days as Christmas is upon me. I have parcels to post, family to visit and other things to be doing. I will be back writing next weekend so I am taking a couple of books hoping that if I read some of them this week then I will save time afterwards.

Fighting Reference Management Software

This weekend was making slow but sure progress until I had to put in a new citation for Halbwachs. This is a book published in 1929, but as he was French I am not reading the original but a translation. So I decided to follow up another little quirk that I have to deal with for my thesis. That is what to do with works that have at least two dates from publications; that is an original date and the date of the version I am quoting. I am using Mendeley, and the one thing Mendeley does not deal well with is this case. Basically, there is a field in Mendeley called "Original publication" and I can fill that field in, in Mendeley. There is also a field called "Original-date" in CSL, which is how you are supposed to tell Mendeley to format your references. You would think they were one and the same. They are not and I cannot find any way to get CSL to reference the original publication field.This is annoying as 50% of my citations have a different original publication to the copy I am using. One case is where I am using the paperback edition, and there has been a prior hardback edition. However, I have a fair few translated texts and several historical texts.

I asked my supervisor early on, and he was clear I needed to publication date of the copy I was using on the incline citation and original publication only in the Bibliography. Fine, so what I was planning on doing was finishing putting my thesis together, then take the Bibliography that was produced and edit it to put in each and every date! Time consuming but not half as much as hacking Mendeley this past summer was going to be.

He has changed his mind, a supervisors prerogative. I now need to have the original publication in the inline citation. That would mean hand editing every single citation and the Bibliograph. So I decided to try and hack Mendeley. At first there appeared to be no improvement. So I decided to go backwards and see if I could hack Endnote, but for this to be a viable option I needed to be able to import into Endnote. That took quite a while to work out and when I had worked it out I realised it was also not working correctly. Not all the "books" were labelled as "books". Given that I have about 500 references in Mendeley, going through and changing them all, plus putting all the information that was lost was going to be time consuming.

So back to Mendeley and then I found another post that told me a work around. Basically, I had to find a field that existed in both Mendeley and CSL had that I was not using. It took some finding but eventually I discovered that the field "genre" met the requirements. Then I can create my own citation style for my thesis. When I have that I can then play with it and get it so it looks right. I have got it to the proof of concept, but it will take several more hours to get it actually into a form that I want.

So I still have to finish the Tradition chapter. I am hoping to scrounge an extra day later in the week but hope to spend some evenings on it as well so I can justify having Christmas week off.

Pre Christmas Supervision

A Welcome Mug of Tea at New Street

Its been a long time since my last supervision, the one in October which was suppose to be the last before submission, only it wasn’t. I have been doing a lot of work since then but also had a holiday. The combined effect of having to restructure my thesis and a holiday have led to me being far more creative than I have been for the last year. Creativity is not a process at present of creating out of nothing but far more akin to putting together a collage and changing it from being something that is just a collection of used bits into something that feels a cohesive whole. This is harder than you would imagine not least because I seem to insist on collecting the most disparate of things.

Since last supervision I have reversed outlined my entire PhD using Scrivener, tackled two of the dutiful chapters (introduction and methodology) and also worked on the chapters on flows and traditions. All these had been sent to my supervisor even though at least the traditions chapter was anything but finished.

Well I have been back to see my supervisor today in Birmingham. The place was swarming with the Winter Graduation candidates. I am pleased to note that the University of Birmingham seems to require people to dress semi-formal which for women means either black/grey dress or black/grey skirt and white blouse. For someone whose first degree had the formality of St Andrews this is copable with, and there is little chance of clashes. Actually there was a real beauty about the red brick campus against the frost cold of a bright December day.

However I was not graduating, I am just reorganising my thesis prior to submitting. My supervisors assessment of where I am at and where I thought I was at agreed. He does feel that this time things are fitting together in a way that was just not the case in the previous version and this shows in what I am doing. Two chapters are now in final form (well bar one small change in the one part that can’t be finalised until I have finished in the introduction i.e. the description of the chapters to come).  So that is Introduction and Methodology put to one side until final edit. The other two  under review today require quite a bit of work. One of these was not a surprise, it really was not ready for review but because it showed how my thought was developing I thought it well sending it to my supervisor. The other perhaps is, but it felt a bit skinny as if the bones were there but not the sinews. This is in part because the sinews I had on before had to be removed as they no longer worked, but I need to create new stuff.

The programme now is to get the tradition chapter back to him before Christmas and then to go back to flows after Christmas. The aim being to get the majority of remaining six chapters to my supervisor by 29th February. I may need extra time, but I think it is doable.

Well as ready as I will be for next supervision

Well this has not been a week of good progress. Good progress would mean that I basically had my chapter on tradition back in draft. It did not sound much to do, just an extra section that gives the references to people who have also written about the tradition and something on Bourdieu. The shock was to realise that the language he was using reflected very accurately a specific theorem. The remains the Bourdieu was quite a skilled user of statistic, but many of his followers have a simplistic understanding of what he was doing. He was choosing statistical techniques because they fitted with what he was researching. That does not make those statistical techniques somehow better than others but it does make his use of techniques better. Well David Cornick returned the compliment and started using "habitus" without referencing Bourdieu.  Now I have the idea I have to go away and think what the implications are. For a start things do not behave as nicely with human culture as you do with probabilistic models.

Progress on the whole has been slow, I did have an extra day on Tuesday as the UCU was on strike again only I seem to have a rare ability to throw migraines on strike days with the result that my brain only started functioning late on in the day. Then on Thursday I was feeling off colour but went into work anyway. The result was that for the first time in a couple of years I have had a head cold. I have had a couple of days when the effect of the cold left me decided feverish. The result is that I have not made the progress that I hoped on the chapter of tradition.

However I have sent the tradition chapter in its very much draft form to my supervisor as I am aware that things are dropping into place in a way that they did not in the final stages in the spring. I want to check with him that these ideas are at last coming on with something that is worthwhile. This chapter is growing and I suspect that it could grow further.

I am beginning to wonder if there is not a book that looks at the way that the Reformed tradition is embodied in the local congregation. This would expand this chapter to fill the space and mean I needed to spend more time reading the tradition. I am getting more confident with handling it and my hand waving is getting less arbitrary. For instance I have replaced a section on falling out in general with a synopsis of the big falling out for the Reformed tradition which is the debate between Predestinarianism and Armininianism which happened at the second Synod of Dort. What it actually did was provide a template for future fallings out within the Reformed tradition! I am at the point of wanting to check how Scotland dealt with Congregational discipline for another part and slowly but slowly I building a much more Empirical model.

Starting Advent and Starting to see the Form Emerge

Seasonal Lights in City Centre

Well I have sent the chapter on flows to my supervisor yesterday. That means he has three chapters to discuss with me next week. Actually I am very tempted to try and get a fourth one to him even if it is not quite up to the readiness the other chapters are. That is because as part of my rewrite of it I will start to be putting in the new focusses to that chapter, and that should change the feel of it substantially. The flows chapter was in the end a matter of cutting a lot so relatively easy to get into the right form. This next chapter needs more fresh writing. Indeed I sat down today with a pen, paper and timer and wrote against the clock. Actually what I produced in the time will mainly go in the bin, but at the end of it I carried on writing, and I actually started to write something worthwhile which can form the basis of the extra bit I need to write.

Now I am struggling with how to edit the rest of this chapter, there are detailed edits to be done but there is also structural work. Do I correct the detailed edits and then do the structural work knowing that I might not need to make all the edits or do I do structural work and then sit down and work through the detailed edits which now might be in a totally different place. Decisions, decisions.

I also would be further on if there had not been two power cuts this weekend. This has delayed writing although both were at night. Once I know the power is off, and I nearly always am woken by it going off, I only sleep lightly until it comes back on. So I have needed to catch up on sleep once it was on. Todays was worse as it was still off at breakfast time so I went out to get a coffee to warm up and only returned once it was on. Still not used my emergency camping stove but was glad I had it and was wondering whether I should invite the neighbours around for soup.

This evening went to the cathedral having forgotten it was advent 1. So ended up with triple the usual congregations or more in the same space. Sheffield Cathedral has building works so it was in St George's chapel. That said it was not over full and I managed to find a corner where I was almost tucked behind a pillar. Unsurprisingly the whole message was "Be prepared" but I am getting that rather a lot these days.

Back into editing after holiday

A tree with red rather
than brown leaves

Well I am back in Sheffield, and I am back to editing. This weekend I have started to edit the chapter on flows. This is the chapter that came out of the final position and has now moved into the first chapter.

The picking up was hard, I had taken a complete break while away. However this weekend I have managed to slowly work through it. I also spent some time watching videos on Fluid Dynamics as a way to fairly quickly get back into the metaphor. The problem was that it pointed out to me ways that I had stretched the metaphor which do not exactly work. So there was quite a bit of rewriting to do.

There was also a lot of cutting that needed doing. When it was at the end of the thesis I had to pull bits from the description chapters into this chapter to connect. Now I have to do it the other way around and draw on the metaphor when I come to working in those chapters. I also had to rewrite totally the conclusion to this chapter as it was doing the wrong thing.

However, my break has clarified two things. Firstly this chapter is arguing that the metaphor is important to the way a subject is understood and therefore we need to be a lot more clear about our metaphors. Secondly my three descriptive chapters will each pick up one of the elements of the metaphor I have picked up in this chapter. Thus giving them an analytic as well as a descriptive function within the thesis. This was clearly lacking in what I have written previously and works quite easily with the rewritten chapters.

The slow down before a break

Rainbow from earlier this week

The last couple of weeks I have had more writing time than I expected. I have needed this as I have also been struggling with minor illness. Last weekend a cold cut my writing right down as I did not feel up to concentrating on anything. Actually it was a time when I was run down and tired already. This was shown by the number of migraines I was getting. The drop in temperature just added to the woes. I suspect if I had been physically fit last weekend I would have got my methodology chapter off to my supervisor.

However,circumstances came to the rescue. I had a day off I needed to take before the end of the month, Then my union called a strike for Thursday which meant a rethink. I was originally going to go in to teach a class as it was necessary, and re-timetabling would not have been easy.  However the lead tutor on the course suggested other ways of delivering the content. This meant I needed to swap around my day off so I could do the necessary work on Monday rather than Wednesday. That meant that I actually stopped work on Wednesday lunch time for this weekend. As is quite often the case when I am run down I threw a migraine on Wednesday afternoon and was fragile from it well into Thursday. So the extra time might just have buffered my writing time.

Last weekend I tackled quite a bit of the creative stuff and just started on the bit about Appreciative Inquiry. I made a comment that it had a very similar cycle to that of the pastoral cycle developed by Laurie Green. Now I have already said about my problems with his Pastoral Cycle and something was pulling at my brain. So I did some research and found I had opened a can of worms. Firstly the thing that was pulling at my brain was the Kolb Learning Cycle and I realise though I have not explored that it has a wealth of tradition on which it draws. Secondly Segundo does actually have a cycle in it, but he calls it a "hermeneutic cycle" which is actually a philosophical problem which looks at the relations between a statement and the whole of language. I eventually trace down a version of it that is reminiscent of the pastoral cycle by Gadamer. My reading is Gadamer did not get as far as the diagram, but I have read enough to say that that diagram is a fair summary of his text. So two new sources but hermeneutic circle is a particularly Protestant concern why is this suddenly turning up in South American Roman Catholicism. That is when I turn up the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm which though only written down in the twentieth century predates all the others by about four hundred years. This is one very complex twisted rope that has created a plethora of signification.

Anyway having sorted that I now have to think whether I change the writing in my methodology about my analytic method to make it sound like a learning circle. I could do, it would not be hard, but it might be pretending to more than it is. My analytic method is simply that that I have used and worked with in a variety of settings which seems to work. I use it when dealing with statistics, writing poems and I have used it when analysing my thesis. I also struck something else, I have a language problem when dealing with the literature. I use the literature, lots of it, but I do not talk about it in the way classical sociology does. There are good reasons and there are bad reasons for this. Firstly there is the fact that there are few theorists who address directly what I am looking at. I have had to borrow from adjoining fields. This actually means that there is not a real discourse between them. Thus using a discursive metaphor which is what sociology uses is difficult. There is also that the fields I usually work in do not do this, they prefer to use the discovery metaphor. The debate metaphor creates disagreement and emphasises discrepancy, the second discovery metaphor tends to favour concordance and emphasises agreement. Words are not neutral.

Anyway I got through the draft of the methodology chapter yesterday and sent it to my supervisor and proof readers. So today I had to decide what to do. If I was not going on holiday then quite simply I would be opening up the next chapter and working on it. However, I will have a fortnight break largely from thesis. I am not away for a fortnight but with one thing and another going on locally I have a fortnights break. So doing major edits was not going to be easy. So today I worked my way through the chapter. I did make some edits but not many but more importantly I was trying to get some idea of the structure of the chapter and how it needed to change. There were some definite cuts, but there was also an inclusion. I spotted one duplication of text and I also think I spotted some points when a tidy up was called for.  So now I have worked through it I will let it sit on the back burner while I am on holiday.

Well I have managed to re-draft the introduction

The photo was taken a couple of weeks back but it is late already and I still need to tidy before I go to bed so it seemed appropriate.

Most of the weekend I have spent getting the introduction up to scratch. I struggled at a couple of points. The first was that Laurie Green says he uses the work of Freire and Segundo when he talks about the pastoral cycle. Now I can not say that he does not but the connection between the pastoral cycle and "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is tenuous to say the least. I am hoping that Segundo's classic has more in it. The thing is that I suspect that there is much more radical behind their thought than Laurie Green expects. That is a theology that is based on the way people who do not have specialised theological training do theology. To get at that you must first of all listen to people who do it. When people do this, they are often shocked at the things people come out with. I know I was. However when you listen harder you realise they do not work in the same theological framework that theologians do and the answers theologians give therefore are nonsense to them. If these people are to be able to talk with theologians then theologians need to learn their language, not the other way around.

I also spent a considerable time on Foucault and am pretty sure I am getting more and more familiar with his late thought although I do not stick with it. The penalty is that there is now quite a big section on my bookshelf with his work on it. I am still looking for a really neat quote when Foucault explains what technology is. I have it quoted as from him but with no reference. This is very frustrating. I have to use a reference by Rose to cover it. This is despite Foucault having a paper out called "Technology of the Self"

To add to the difficulties last night I discovered that getting a Word version out of Scrivener is not as simple as just compiling it! I have to do quite a bit of reformatting work on top of re-entering the references. I need to investigate further as some parts of Scrivener are just opaque to me. I will get there but it will take time.

Today the frustrations have been technological. My router decided to misbehave badly and as I was using Grammarly at the time this was not good news. So I installed the replacement one I have had for when this happened. It gives me faster connection but tends to disconnect more frequently. I am considering switching it off when I am not using it. I do know the installation did not work particularly well as I had to reset one variable so as to get the wireless working.

Anyway I have sent the chapter off to my supervisor with a request for a date for the next supervision. Hopefully he will spot that my diary is busy and realise that his is probably also filling up.

I have sent my reverse outline to my Supervisor

Thesis Outline

Well today was the deadline for getting a plan together for my thesis rewrite. That meant that I needed to get the reverse outlining. Reverse outlining is depressing as it shows you all the glitches in your thesis. It is also very time consuming. That outline is so tall and thin because I have gone down to the concept level. That has meant writing one and two line descriptions for every couple of paragraphs. A thesis contains a lot of paragraphs.

The big problem is that I have done quite a lot of thinking around the belonging chapter, and I am finding that I am intrigued by the whole process. Oddly enough there are ideas out there which seem worth looking at. I am wondering if Lefebvre approach to Space might be worth generalising to other concepts. If that is the case then we have a complex process to consider. Most thinkers seem to approach it either with a top down or a bottom up process and see it single direction. Some of the better thinkers seem to see it as involving both. What Lefebvre does is then to say but there is also a process of negotiation, a process by which the two technologies tie themselves together. The problem is that he deals solely with Space, and his conceptualisation is related to Space. I am also less tied to the central organisation as supporting an ideological dominant discourse.

I am finding Scrivener interesting. The re-organisation with it is not something I would have liked to try with Word. I would have either been moving paragraphs around between multiple documents or trying to do it with a single large document that was my full thesis. Even on my quite powerful computers at home and work Word only grudgingly would do it for me.

However there is a big snag, it has dropped all my links to my citation database. This means every single one of them will have to be recreated by hand before I can create the bibliography properly. I only did it because Mendeley was saying I could cite anyway even though there was no plug in. I have tried, and it does work well at all. However,I am finding ways around bits I did not think it was going to handle. The result is I am working out a new workflow that will get me to a final version that is good enough for submission. It involves working first in Scrivener, exporting chapters to Word, going through with Grammarly and putting in references. Then send to proof readers, so my readers are dealing with more structural issues.

Oh submission date looks like it is February or March now. It depends on what state my thesis is in, in January. The idea being to get the first three chapters into form by the end of November and then over Christmas and New Year to blitz the remaining six (this is not as daft as it seems, three of the chapters now just need reshaping in quite specific ways).

Oh I need a new title and I seem to be unable to get my head around that.

Back to the Draft:

A Piece of Wild plant Garden all tidied up 

for Autumn outside a local School

The first thing is to tackle how I have got on with the settling back into re-writing and re-drafting mode.

The first thing to say is I said I could not let my supervisor know until next weekend. This was because I knew I was busy this weekend. Indeed I was working for about half of Friday and had some other bits a pieces to deal with. However,this does not mean I have been inactive.


I have fought off using Scrivener for a while. Some of this caution is due to the difficulty of using Scrivener with references from Mendeley. However I was faced with a challenge I really did not want to tackle in Word and that was trying to reorganize an entire thesis. the other thing is that Scrivener has story boarding facilities.Now of course ideally you would do that at the start of your thesis but mine, like Topsy, just grew. Actually that is not fair, I had a plan but it has been changed so many times since I started writing that really I have lost control.

Thus I took the plunge and got hold of Scrivener and started to use it to Reverse Outline so as to get some idea of what is where in the thesis. The fact that Scrivener has a story board facility means I can reverse outline with the text right alongside.  Actually that is not quite right as I am also working through the pages as I go and trying to reorganise things so they are in the right place.

Having now sat down, I must admit that the thesis last Wednesday was not at a level I would have liked to defend. The process of reverse outlining is taking me back into the thesis and seeing where it is weak. I am also aware that the reordering and a couple of insertions as suggested by my supervisor starts to make the thesis tell a story.

The aim at present is to have got through the reverse outlining by next weekend, which will basically give me a set of edits to make to my thesis. Then to write to my supervisor and tell he what the process is and how I want to organise it.

Perhaps what I am most happy with about this incident is that it showed my research instincts were right. What I was producing was not good enough. Now having been through this I have things slotting in much better and I think I am starting to know the story I am telling. The storyboarding should allow me by next weekend to actually be a lot clearer on where I am going and to stick to it rather than get diverted by new interesting ideas. My instinct is a lot happier at present and is beginning to run with the situation.

However due to Scriveners weaknesses I am expecting to have to do quite a bit of work at the end of the thesis to tidy it up in Word and to sort out the references.

The State of  Higher Education: This was formerly the
University Branch of Waterstones!

Today was the day when I had the supervision after sending a full draft to my supervisor just over two weeks ago.  Today was also the day bins are collected locally. As I set out one of the bin men was sheltering from the rain in the bin shed while the van came round and took the bins which were neatly lined up by the pavement. It had been raining over night and although it was already easing it was still pretty wet. This is unusual for a supervision but by the time I had arrived in Birmingham the weather was dull but dry.

The journey was largely uneventful but the University had a council meeting this afternoon and my supervisor being now a deputy pro vice chancellor was expected to attend. This meant that the supervision had been brought forward and hour to 1:00 pm. The choice was to have lunch before or afterwards, afterwards being approaching 4:00 pm because the supervision was for 2.5 hours. Tricky but decided that a coffee and flapjack before I went would get me through while eating before hand would be tricky indeed.

At 1:00 pm I was knocking on my supervisors door. The plan was that this should be a thorough review and then a month to go to finalise. Unfortunately as I knew when I sent it although I could not quite put my finger on it, that there was something that was not quite there.  The metaphor was that I used was that it was like jam that was not jelling. It was good enough to go over ice-cream or such but not really set. The problem is that it is not simply a matter of finessing what is there but requires some substantial reworking in order to sort.

My supervisor agreed with this assessment. His suggestion was that I brought the final chapter to immediately after my methodology. That sounds the work of minutes, in actual fact it means quite a large re-write of six chapters. This makes sense. Indeed in my questioning of why it was not gelling, it had been part of what I considered doing, but rejected it due to time restraints to get the thesis to my supervisor by mid September.

My supervisor was quite wary of suggesting of it, I think I would have been floored if I had not already half thought of it. As it is, I am aware that I can call up the energy to do it this time, however I just have to hope that it works as I think it is highly unlikely I can get it up to do another re-organise after this. That said already I can feel bits and pieces dropping into place, but I think I am not going to be able to do this in Word, so may have to learn Scrivener.

There are a number of small bits of writing I need to do as well. Among them is an odd piece. My supervisor asked me to describe the method that I used to produce my results. One problem is that my method neither falls into classic inductive or deductive approach. Surprisingly I was able to explain my method of being very similar to the process by which I write poetry. I now have to write a short section, but oddly enough it gets me out of a lot of the problems with my referencing and debating which I was getting into. Well I did not expect to create a new approach to reasoning for the Social Sciences when I started this process. Actually I do not think I did; there is the performance of deductive or inductive reasoning within a thesis that is established but my experience suggest most use a combination. What I do think is that my experience of working in a vast range of research projects through my day job has put me in a position where I have the confidence to say “Actually it worked like this…”. It is quite something for a young researcher to do, but I am not new, it is just about being honest about the approach.

So the story is that I will not be submitting at the end on this Month. It is going to take two to three months to work through this supervision. I need to rearrange and ask for extension leave from one group in an attempt to get this. I will also need to give up a course I was planning to start in January but doing the course and finalising a thesis is a non-starter. However,I actually think after this summer and the effort it has taken I will need to take my holiday in November and just take the time out. The good thing is that I have a bit more space to do things around the end of the month which was looking very crowded.

Before anyone thinks I have a down on Costa, they supplied me with a soya latte and flapjack to keep me going during supervision and a peppermint tea with space to write on the way home, so no I am not, I am just missing having a handy bookshop to drop into!

Drafted and Bound

 A bound copy of current draft of my thesis

I am in a strange place at the moment. After over a decade of working towards my thesis, I am in the position where I can not do anything for almost three weeks. It feels weird.

Over the last week I have been pulling my thesis together, sorting out small details, such as the bibliography, front papers and a list of figures, plus getting it in the right format for the University of Birmingham for when I submit it.

Of course as with all theses, just as I got to the end of the first print out the printer threw a fit and not one I could sort. A friend, thanks Dave, came and fiddled with it, eventually turning it off and on again and it started working. So on Tuesday afternoon I actually took it to local binders. This was to basically get a binding that enables the two people (my supervisor and a proof reader who has not read any of it before) to work easily with a paper copy of a long document. All the proof reading and correcting effort that has gone in over the last few weeks should pay off and make it a readable document for them.

Today I collected it from the local binders and put one copy in an envelope to send to my supervisor. The only thing was while doing that I went to demonstrate what happened if you changed computers and did not check through when working with Word (Word formats changes with printers that you are printing to, it is why much to my supervisors annoyance I have not numbered pages until now). However in doing so I found the figures were on far more different pages than I would expect. The reason being that I had actually changed the margins slightly and not then gone and checked the figures. Lesson learnt.

I then stopped off at the local Tesco and bought some reasonably priced sparkling wine. Then went along to my Local Post Office. It was shut for the morning. RETHINK.

So I went home and searched the web for alternative Post Offices. I found one in the city centre and so headed down there and put it in on special delivery. It is addressed to my supervisors official address, not to his actual office. So I sent him and email saying where I had sent it. Hopefully by Monday it will have been delivered to a place where he can collect it!

This blog is now going to go silent until my next supervision after which I will let you know what I still need to do.

Collating and Back to the Introduction

Books relating to Foucault

This weekend I have traced and proofed all my appendices.  I ended up with six appendices including a Bibliography. I have drafted and abstract which is 100 words too long (50%), so I am going to have to cut that down quite drastically and the big challenge is not to say succinctly what the study was but to say succinctly what the findings are. Then I have pulled the whole thesis together! This took up most of Friday.

So yesterday(Saturday) I pulled the whole thing together and did a lot of the formatting work. I now have a table of contents and also list of illustrations. I have called them illustrations but basically anything that is not pure text. So there is a table, several diagrams, a couple of photos and at least one drawing. I could find eleven in total.  What this means, is that I can finally do an exact count of the number of words in the text; 76,863 to be precise. This means that I have approximately 3,000 words to play with, maybe slightly more. The question is what are my priorities for these words. There are two, the first is to extend the section on Foucault in my introduction, not hugely but so that it actually makes an argument rather than just states the case. This has set me back to reading Foucault today. The second is to develop my conclusion.

There are however several other tidying-ups that need to  be done. One is highly related with the first, and that is to check through all the references to Foucault in my thesis and make sure they are consistently referencing the appropriate texts. The second is to find all the references to "I" and check they are appropriate and if not to remove them. I have removed some of them as I have been proof editing, but I am quite sure that some have got in. It is fine to write "I did X"; it is not fine to write "I think the second option". The first is a statement of what I did, the second is a hedging of bets. Then there is the Bibliography that needs to be sorted through and making sure it is coherent and correct. Plus putting in all the originally published information. Fortunately I have a six day weekend made up from annual leave next weekend. 

A lo-ong weekend on thesis

Part of a local bench

Well this has been a long drawn out weekend working on thesis. It started on Thursday, and I really go back into work tomorrow. Two of the days were thesis days from work. These will be some of the last I ever do. I now have the text largely in proof! It is weird. This whole afternoon I have felt as if something very scary, but very exciting was happening. Now that I am actually pretty close the relief of having a proof version of the thesis text is like bubbles of champagne running through my veins.

It has not been easy even this weekend. I had a friends marriage go through major ructions and the husband ended up briefly sleeping on my floor for one night. I had a migraine at the start of the weekend, and I have had a mild infection or hayfever so did not go over to my parents.

Thursday and Friday only slow progress was made although I got the Worship chapter into proof. Saturday I tackled the Methodology chapter and I can see why my supervisor thought it was good. It was by far the easiest of all the chapters to refine into proof. However in the last three days I have struggled with the introduction and the conclusion. These are the shortest chapters of the thesis, yet they have taken more time and effort than some of the longer chapters which I was doing in a day and a half each,and these, at about the same length when put together, were took three.

However I still have to write the abstract, sort the appendices, put the text together and format it in the right form for the thesis and so on. I have a little time over the next three weeks to put these final touches in.

Half way through editing and I made even song

I got another two chapters in proof this weekend and I finished about 5:30 pm so I snatched a meal, briefly rang my parents and headed off to the Cathedral for Evening Prayer. Got there just in time, not quite the last in the door but almost and the Old Testament reading included:

For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept
line upon line, line upon line
here a little, there a little.

Hum it sounds like God has been doing some editing as well. When you here about editing it, sounds tedious and editing 80,000 words sounds very tedious. Well I am not finding it so. It is far more similar to doing a large puzzle when you know you have the basics worked out but you need to get everything exactly right. It is concentrated effort. I think there is one sentence that I rewrote three times today just to get it to express what I wanted it to say!

Writing has the satisfaction of producing

Drafting has the satisfaction of shaping it 

Editing has the satisfaction of getting it right.

Each satisfaction feels different and has a different downside. The fear when you are producing that the words will not come, the way that shaping a project just takes over the whole of your brain and the frustration of not getting things right.

There are times when all I want to do is go out and do something different, such as the time when Grammarly decided to forget that I had gone through a section deciding which words to use and therefore made me go through it again pressing the ignore button for twenty minutes. There are times when I look at a sentence and I can not make head nor tail of it, or if I can it is utterly irrelevant to what I am saying at that point in the chapter. There are also times when I wonder if I have gone through the same passage three times or whether there are three very similar sounding passages in what I have written. Repeated sentences are one of the trolls waiting to catch you out when you are drafting. Then there are times of utter frustration when you go to look up a quote and you find that instead of ordering a book, you have ordered a book about the book!

That said five chapters in draft, which leaves me worship, methodology, introduction and conclusion to go. That is four. Hoping I will be able to extend the long weekend next weekend so I can get all this done with a couple of work at home days.

 

Another Two Chapters down and I am getting used to Grammarly

Well I have gone through two more of my chapters and got them into final draft. I think I am close on 24 hours of work this weekend and maybe more. That is actual time working on them. The editing process is interesting. Anyone who has ever proof edited or read an unedited essay by me will know that there is something "odd" about the way I use language. Actually it has been known about ever since I was in school but in those days nobody thought that a bright child might have special learning needs.

That meant that I had to get over myself long before I started my PhD. It is also why all my essays were proof read. I am finally putting together a proofed version of my thesis. So far what I have done is to take the amendments by my proof editors, go through them and then put the whole thing through Grammarly. Now I put it through on academic settings and I am not slavish to the demands. For instance Grammarly will pick up any use of the passive voice. However in a lot of academic writing the passive voice is actually necessary. The other item is the use of impersonal second person pronoun instead of "one". Now I can introduce "one" into the text but really that sounds more artificial than "you". What Grammarly does not pick up is my nervous tick of using "I" when I want to say "this is my opinion, you are free to have yours but.." Most of the time I just need to remove them from the text.  There are legitimate uses of I, such as when writing about how I am going to structure the text but these apologetic-Is are not  good.

However probably far more useful than the grammar checker is the synonym suggestion. I go through each and everyone of those and this is necessary. The point is when you get to looking at synonyms you can only decide which are best when you have a clear idea what the sentence is saying and how that word works in the sentence. This has regularly drawn to my attention sentences that do not make sense. They might have perfectly good English grammar but they fail to convey any meaning. No doubt at some time in my brain those sentences meant something but it is not there now. So I have to sit down, work through in detail what the sentence probably originally said and recreate the sentence so it conveys something.

So far in draft are Tradition, Location and Flows. Next week I would like to tackle Community and Belonging, at least in part because I think there maybe overlap. The week after is the long weekend and must work out what time I want off to finish other the chapters. If I manage to keep this pace then I should be ready to send to my supervisor on time.

Hopefully one chapter in proof draft

I think I am competing for most boring thesis picture this week as I have put up a picture of what I hope is some of the text of my final thesis. Of course I have not anything significant, just a random bit of text and part of a picture. Yes I have managed to get the occasional picture into my thesis.

Actually the entire weekend has been spent trying to get that chapter into a proof form. This has been quite a task as there was some re-organisation left to do. So this weekend I first worked through my proof readers alterations, then went through and structurally reorganised it and finally went through with Grammarly with it. What Grammarly was annoying in two respects: it picked up uses of generic "you" which are entirely appropriate for the sort of academic writing I am doing and it also picked up the passive which is used a lot more in academic writing than in general writing. I just told it to ignore the first and I had a go at removing the second but did not worry too much if I simply could not.

However it very usefully had an error that it called "Too Wordy". I think it was intended to catch too flowery language. However what it ended up doing was picking up sentences which were what I would call run on sentences. That meant at the start of the sentence I was writing one sentence and at the end I was writing the next sentence. The cojoined twins of the sentence universe. They usually made no sense at all. I needed to separate the two sentences and make sure each said what I intended it to say.

Anyway I have sent the chapter back to one of my proof readers to see if all this concentration on detail has actually made the chapter better or has destroyed the structure.

Oh it is the chapter on flows which is probably the hardest chapter to write well as it crosses the boundary between science and social science. This makes the choice of language interesting as I need to use words differently in different parts of the chapter.

Settling down to producing a good proof

One of the oddities of this summer is that sometimes to mark the end of a day I am having a gin and tonic. Now do not get me wrong, the surprise is not me having a long slow slightly alcoholic drink in summer; it is that it is a gin and tonic. My usual preference is for Whisky and Ginger, but this year that feels just too strong a flavour set, so a Gin and Tonic it is.  Tonight's is to mark the fact that I have finished the last part of my second draft. I have gone back through my conclusion and sent off a second draft to my supervisor. I am pretty sure that this version is fine. The changes were actually quite small just really connecting my conclusion back to the literature I have used in the introduction. I considered for a while putting in something by my suggested examiner but decided that that is probably better off in the relevant chapter.

So this evening I have spent time checking what pieces I had in proof read form. This is not simple as some chapters have been several times in different forms to my proof readers. Indeed at least one chapter got pulled out of second draft and restructured pretty late on. I had to email my proof readers to see if they had done a couple of chapters that I could not find. However next week I start the process of proof reading and compiling the whole document! I will start with the one chapter that still needs a small amount of structural editing. I wrote stuff that needed to go into it in my initial conclusion instead of what needed to be in the conclusion.

Family wise, we are hoping Dad will come out of hospital on Monday or Tuesday. If that is the case my sister is still talking of bringing the kids over on Tuesday for the annual swim and Chinese. Then deal with anything that needs dealing with in the evening. I think I will also go over on Thursday, fetch anything needed from my parents house and then go and see them. So there is plenty to keep me out of trouble.

Apart from that this week I have to pull together all the bits and pieces dealing with that and hopefully next weekend I can get through that and maybe start on the next one as well. 

Now to put the whole thing together

Train coming into University Station

This was a strange supervision in someways. Not least because this month I was half expecting with the struggle that was going on over previous weeks for my thesis to be delayed again. I really had only had the last weekend as solid writing and though I had played with the introduction in the first few weeks and I had done some reading while sitting my Mum. (For those that do not know there is more info in my previous blog post). So I did not feel as if I had got time to work on it. Indeed unlike last month when I spent a couple of partial weekends not drafting my conclusion, I sat down yesterday with the idea that I had to get something down and ended up with a half way decent draft. It needs some more connecting with the literature which will connect it back to the introduction and the rest of the thesis.

That means several things. Firstly I need to put in my notice to submit in the next few days giving my submission date as 31st October. Secondly I have to pull the full thesis together, go through doing all the proof reading, minor editing and creating the bibliography, page numbering, add the appendices etc. It has to be with my supervisor by 16th September. Finally one more supervision in October to have a full review of the thesis. In other words if life does not bowl me another curved ball everything is in order for submitting in the middle of the autumn much to my surprise.

However I am fighting a battle with University of Birmingham administration to get registered for next year. You would think that Universities would be eager to take money and get students enrolled but at present they will not even investigate why I can not enrol. This means that come September they start hassling me to do things when it is them who have been the delay.

Not to have a proper grump, the rennovations at Birmingham New Street are a total pain at present. To get home I had to:

1. Come up from platform 8
2. Go through two ticket barriers to get to WH Smith
3. Go to where the lift to platform 12 was only to find it out of order
4. Walk back through both ticket barriers
5. Go back down to platform 12 and take the steps down

On the way down I saw a disabled person on crutches struggling to get up to street level. To put it mildly I was not impressed.

Anyway despite the ridiculous amount of hassle this month it looks as if everything is still on line for an October submission.

Family Emergence slows progress

Last weekend I was really looking forward to this weekend and at last a chance to sit down and work solidly on my thesis. That hope lasted until Tuesday and on the evening I got a phone call from my sister to say Dad had collapse while out with friends and she was at my parents' home waiting for a taxi to bring my Mum home. It was agreed she would look after Mum who has dementia that night and I would take over the next day. Whereas I am single and therefore with compassionate leave from work, my sister has a two children and a husband working both for a church and as the book keeper for her husband who is self employed.

So for the last five days my role has been a main carer for my mother. This is not made any easier by the fact that Dad is in hospital 43 miles away, and though Google says it is 48 mins I would say it is more than an hour when dealing with the real traffic. Given that my sister travels for half an hour before starting that journey and on the route calculator from my home to the hospital is the furthest of the three this is not easy. There is also a limit to the amount of compassionate leave I can take.

Unfortunately my father has unrealistic expectations of what I can do. He seems to think I can work, do my thesis and look after Mum 24/7 and also get mum to see him every day. If I  walked out mum would immediately be put in a home with no choice indeed her doctor is not really happy with me doing this as interim. My sister on the other hand has been a brick.

I have done some reading and even a bit of writing but it is hard to do much concentrated as I am working into the times when Mum does not need my immediate attention. So progress has slowed right down although I am aware that the reading will mean that I better versed that I would have been in British Congregational studies. However even that is not getting much attention. Oh the photo was taken at Dunahm Massey today when I took Mum out to take her mind off things. Unfortunately travel is a very good way of allowing her to forget. Actually it does the worse thing it can for Mum's memory which is ask her to sit quiet for a while.  Train travel at least allows her to interact with me or whoever is travelling with her. If she is active or interacting it seems to keep her memory working.

Actually if you had asked before this who would do the organising and who the hands on care for my Mum I would have guessed that it would be better the other way around but actually Mum seems to be calmer with me and my sister is a whizz at dealing with people in authority and finding out what we need to know such as exactly which ward in which hospital Dad is in.

Sabbactical

This plant is growing at the top of a wall not too far away from here. The wall is about five feet tall! I am not sure where it is getting its nourishment from but it is there. Writing my thesis was beginning to feel like this plant. This blog has been more scanty of recent week. One reason for this is actually I have not been making the progress as I was before. There was very good reason for this, I was not getting the time.

Now I have cut back drastically on a lot of things in life in order to make time for thesis. I have not been going out to events, I have not seen my parents for months and I have not planned a holiday. It simply was not enough.

There are three big commitments in my life at present and in order of priority for attention these are thesis, work and church. I should explain I work 80% in a job that could easily be 100% and if I am ill the work still needs doing and the only one who can do that work is me. When I started my PhD the job actually did fit into four days a week, however two to three years ago that changed. I am working flat out and not keeping all the balls in the air. On Monday I have to go into work and explain why I have taken a nine month break from a project. Simply no time gov honest!

So with thesis not going as quickly as I liked and work being demanding, I found that the expectation that I would be getting more and more involved in church a difficult situation to negotiate. It would work like this, something quite small would be asked of me but then as I explored the ramifications the job would get bigger and bigger. Some of this was deliberate hiding of implications, some of this was my personality. If I am involved in doing something I like to see it done well. Actually it felt to me at times as if people were either plotting to find ways to get me more involved or were using me as a default person to ask to do things.

With my job I edit my thesis at weekends, I find that I can read during the week but I do not have the concentration to do editing. Editing is not easy and involves holding lots of strands together and not dropping any. If you think writing a PhD is just writing three masters thesis then you have got the wrong end of the stick. Not only do you have the practical work of three theses, you also have to integrate them together and find something new to say that runs through all three.

I suspect there is actually no shortage of new ideas in my thesis but it has felt at times as if I was trying to corral at least semi-wild horses. The result is that at this stage of my thesis I need coherent times. I can not just switch onto thesis for a hour or two in an evening and do worthwhile work. If I attend worship on a Sunday that really means sitting down at around 4pm to my thesis if at all, days like today when I was table elder take me longer to settle after church. Basically a day lost and when I have only 2.5 days anyway a day is heck of a lot to loose and to loose that regularly (one for five out of the last six is adding up and the sixth was taken with work). If you wonder why 2.5 then half a day goes with shopping and doing household chores.

Basically I got to the point where the time I had for my thesis was not allowing me to make progress.  Something had to give and the only thing that I could give that would allow the time was church. I was clearly not managing me involvement with church in a way that would enable me to finish my thesis. Seeming as the trying to keep a low level involvement going failed. I could not keep the commitment level low enough. The only other option is to opt out completely. There were people who helped me manage my commitment well, there were people who did not. Some of my keeping going so long was the loyalty to the people who were good at not pushing boundaries.

This was actually decided almost two weeks ago, but there was a communion service and only two active elders available for it, apart from me. To do communion in the style my congregation likes we need eight. Therefore dropping out at short notice seemed unfair especially as I was Table Elder 1. If you want that So I have basically just had communion to do. Today was communion and now I should not be back at church until after my thesis has been submitted, so in November.

That said I have been working on it. The big problem is that to write the introduction I am having to trace books and many are not available directly from Amazon, nor would they be in the University Library as they are far too specialist for that. So it would either be inter-library loans or me purchasing them from other dealers. That means I am writing in the expectation of having to include other work. This is tricky. So for the moment I am going to concentrate on writing a conclusion instead and hope that I can write it pretty quickly.

Hopefully next weekend I will get the 2.5 days and be able to make some good progress.

Slowly getting my focus back

This will be short but I have spent most of the weekend sorting out what needed to be done next and beginning to do it. I had been slowly loosing the focus over the weeks before as other demands encroached on my time. I am not clear next, this week has an elders and there is a communion next Sunday.

I have also been very tired this weekend, more than I have been recently. This may be good news as I had not been sleeping too well for the last couple of weeks due to the stress I felt under. This may mean that I have started to sense an easing in it. However I need more time on my thesis and I am finding it hard to find it. Every one is very ready for me to take time in theory but in practice the reality is different. I can take study days at work but I have to be able to complete my work and there is no let up in that.

So this weekend I was basically getting my head around the edits that needed doing to my introduction. They are interesting, not on the whole huge things but quite often requiring some reading and thinking about. I must admit I cut out one comment as it was just not worth the effort I would need to do to justify it. I thought when I put it in that it was accepted knowledge. After all most congregations I have ever been in a lot of the lay leadership has been in their sixties and seventies. It is a rare congregation where it is spread more widely although thinking on it Christ Church Parrswood did have quite a few who were younger though church secretary was Bernard and he was in his sixties. The church treasurer was two people in my time, one in his eighties  and one in his forties. I also know I am not alone in this knowledge, Rev Mike Jackson of Park URC Reading also commented on it when I was there. However there is no literature out there that says this is the case.

Anyway I have got the introduction to the introduction written, in the end I took the very straight forward approach of telling my examiners what this thesis was about. I have also done quite a bit on the vision process. Some tidying of the last section. So this week I really need to read enough of a couple more Congregational Studies books to make a complete literature review. I am trying to trace any thesis (masters or doctoral) that has been done within British Reformed or Non-Conformist Churches that is a study of congregation(s) and uses ethnographic method. So far I have found a geographer at Edinburgh University who has done some research on Free Church of Scotland that is Ethnographic (actually I may need to reference that work in a later chapter as well). I also have found a Presbyterian Lecturer in New Zealand who puts his interest as Congregational Studies and knows enough as to list the URC. The major problem is finding a forgotten thesis.

All but the abstract drafted but little actual progress

Alien from post it notes in window
of Computer Science at Birmingham

A bit later than usual, a mix of catching the earlier train home because I am not quite sure where to find a place to write with the building work at New Street and needing to do something when I go in.

The last two weeks on my blog I have failed to write up about thesis work. That was not because I was not doing some, when I got the chance I did. It was that rather the work has been unfocused and I know when I am unfocused that I am usually not producing what I need to produce. Now do not get me wrong, my supervisor actually felt what I wrote was not bad, it just was not what I should have been writing. Indeed he felt that I probably should include the central bit of my draft conclusion in another chapter. It just was not conclusion. He has now told me what to put in a conclusion, not what are my findings but what are the tasks I need to do.

At May’s supervision my challenge for the month was to get the methodology into shape and to get to second draft the introduction and conclusion. I think I did the methodology but the introduction and conclusion were still only in first draft. This has added a month onto my time it will take to finish my thesis.

However there was good reason why I was unfocused, and that was that I was distracted. In April I was so absorbed in my thesis I felt as if I was never without working on it in the back of my brain, May I got by because there were plenty of bank holidays and those allowed me to spend enough time on my thesis for it to absorb me. However June has been a lesson in being over committed. What really happened if I am honest is I did not let go of my last chapter and work out what I had to write for the conclusion.  Therefore because I was not focused on what I needed to write for my conclusion I just continued to writing the last chapter.

I find that I can not just sit down and start writing, I need to spend a while mulling the ideas around, and generally not producing very much. After a while I seem to enter into the writing and then I find that I can actually produce good work pretty quickly. I need to think through what I am writing and if I do not then I do not produce what is required. This last month I tried to do without that time and I FAILED to produce so basically I am back where I was at the start of June with what I need to do.

The good news is that we worked out a submission date for my thesis. I can therefore start to make plans around how things fit together. I may even book holiday for while it is being read by my examiners. Also my supervisor does not expect substantive revisions of my thesis. It really is about getting thing sorted. The one thing that must not be allowed to happen is for me to enter a state where I am endlessly writing up. That will not do me or anyone else any good.

So despite Birmingham being dry and even having time to sit in the sun, it was my toughest supervision to date.

Methodology Finally Redrafted Despite a Wedding

The last glass of champagne at 

the wedding

The last champaign glass left on the table once all the other stuff had been cleared from the after wedding celebration. No it was not mine. It was a church member's daughter. I was not even going to go until a week ago, then I realised that for the sound desk to play background music I probably needed to be there. I then discovered they were bringing a CD.This is problematic, despite the fact my church is old fashioned, we can really only play sound from things with a head phone socket! CDs do not have head phone sockets. We are not too fussed on the sort of socket although it is set for 3.5mm. It also came apparent to me that the church crew were chronically understaffed: one able bodied, one over eighty who is slowing down and another with only one leg. For evacuation in cases of fire you need three door stewards! Actually I cared about the person getting married and the crew to know that I should do something about it. The only problem was that I was supposed to be writing thesis. Indeed I was drawn in four directions as there an Anti-Facist demonstration and also a church plant sale. However those were not serious contenders with thesis. I know where at present my priorities lie but the wedding....

Anyway I did both the rehearsal on Friday evening and the Wedding yesterday which included clearing up afterwards I actually had about four hours in total for study over Friday and Saturday. There was no point in me trying to work immediately on coming in from wedding as I was just overloaded and tired. Even after a couple of hours in bed and some proper food I was still decidedly distracted indeed I felt pretty migrainy. So I decided that I had to say I was not making publicity meeting at church today. Sent the email, only to find it was cancelled. Nice of people to tell me.

So that meant that I would have the full day working on thesis and what was even better my brain was clearing and I was at last able to make some sort of sense of the section on writing as analysis. Having got that sorted, I was able to quite quickly deal with ethics, reflexivity and review. The result is the Methodology at just over 10K words (a drop from 19K) has gone off to my supervisor.

A Wet May Supervision

A Wet View from the Train

I am sitting in the new part of Birmingham New Street Station having just got myself a bottle of water and packet of crisps from Costa. The changes had had me confused all day. This morning I could not even find WH Smiths but the women’s loos were free. The other thing was Waterstones was still open at the University. So I bought a notebook there rather than at WH Smiths.

For once the weather has been wet. Fortunately I walked to Sheffield Station during a let up in the showers and the distance in Birmingham is not far. Just from the University Station to the Arts Building. I know Birmingham Department of Philosophy, Theology and Religion is not in the Arts Building but my supervisors office is and as a result I have not been there since it moved to the Edgebaston Campus.

Well I think I now have all my substantive chapters in second draft. My supervisor actually said he was pleased with the way my thesis was shaping up. However it is clear that I need to work harder at engaging with the literature than I am. I think however some of that is clear because I have not written my introduction and conclusion. Ruth and James I think that means I will be sending you three chapters soon, plus two bits from another chapter which are major reworkings but only of those section.

Equally I am going to have to trace one or two of the books that are Roman Catholic Congregational Studies. I just need to be able to check out their take on tradition. If it is as I expect, then they are actually talking about something different when it comes to tradition than I am in the Reformed sense. What becomes interesting is if that, I have my conclusion, albeit very much in the verbal form at present. I may well need to do a writing brainstorm in order to get it down but it is there. However it does mean my thesis is Foucauldian, in that he is the main thinker that I have interacted with. I am not a disciple, but his ideas do become useful and intriguingly I must admit I have a Foucauldian attitude to Foucault and my discourse with him is pretty wide ranging and eclectic. However where I see Foucault as providing an over arching technology for knowledge systems, I tend instead to see what I am providing is the ability to generate tools that can be useful in the analysis of such systems.

Next month’s challenges is to redraft the introduction, cut by over 50% the methodology and draft the conclusion. That should keep me busy. I may even need to avail myself of the offer of extra time for thesis from work, the only problem is that I am busy, busy at work and finding it difficult to fit things in at present. There also is more I need to do at home.