Heads down, time to get this thing finished

I have been to supervision today, sorry no pretty picture as I did not see anything I felt like photographing. I have managed to redraft the three data chapters, and it was time to review progress with my supervisor not least because my supervisor has a new job that he will start in May. I needed to check my broad assumption that because I was so close to him leaving I did not have to do anything. Universities are not exactly quick on the uptake when it comes to working out how research students are affected by staff changes. The result is they probably will not have noticed that he legally should not be supervising me without special permission. There is no way they will have worked out whether to give him special permission (preferred option) or what alternative contingency arrangement should happen. Also, my notice to submit will have gone in before he leaves;  we did the signing part today.

Anyway I caught a nasty bug last week, I am describing it as a cold officially, but it seems to have been more of a sinus infection with earache and headaches the dominant two features. It was particularly bad yesterday, and I was expecting today to be surviving on decongestants and pain killers. Fortunately, I hit crisis about midnight last night. I still required pain killers to control the throat/ear pain but no headaches!!!! These were not migraine headaches; I could still speak coherently, but they were painful.

Anyway over the last four to six weeks I have revised the methodology and the introduction chapters and make the changes to the data chapters. These were relatively straightforward changes. I was supposed to:

• upgrade the usage of the literature slightly (the main upgrade being in the introduction and the belonging chapter), 
• include stuff from the flows chapter that they wanted cutting, 
• put in quotes from the interviews. 

These tasks are relatively mechanical as writing goes. I was surprised at the way quotes worked. The request was for quotes from interviews to be included. I have problems with quoting out of context. I have heard too many diatribes against doing that with the Bible to happily do it with another source. So I had to find a way around.  It is not entirely satisfactory. However, as my supervisor pointed out having found a way around I need to explain why I am doing that in my Ph.D.

My supervisor also wants me to reference the place in the interview that will be intriguing. There are two options. Firstly to allocate quote numbers to the segment. If done this way it allows you to put them in order, but gives no idea of spacing. The second is to put in line numbers within interviews. The line numbers gives more detail of position but would mean exporting all the transcripts, putting them into work and then getting it to number the lines.

I have finally sorted how at present to deal with food. The last few times I have been buying food and then not wanting to eat it. Sometimes I would eat it and other times I would throw it out. Today instead I decided to buy when I wanted food. The result was that at about noon I had a soya latte and some trail mix and I had yoghurt and green tea about tea time. Neither was really a meal but neither was totally unhealthy and I had a meal waiting at home to be eaten.

The other nice thing was that with the cold when I bought my latte I left my credit card in the reader and the Costa Barrista on finding it called me and returned it to me! That was enough to persuade me to use a Costa later in the day. Needless to say the sun was shinning and it was a pleasant day while I was in Birmingham.

So with all that out of the way, I need to get my head down and write the Belonging chapter and the Epilogue.  I have started on the Belonging chapter and have spelt out in minute detail the difference between faith membership, institutional membership and community membership.  It feels a bit like giving the primary school guide to congregational structure but as my examiners do not get this when I made more oblique reference I am having to spell it out in detail. The Epilogue is where I need to assert originality which basically means that I am going to have to relate the argument of the thesis back to the literature in the Introduction plus maybe one or two other items.